Sephtyan
April 13th, 2013, 01:38 AM
I always find it slightly amusing when someone starts talking about Humans as being great or beautiful. Their opinions are by no means wrong, I just find them to be structured along completely different railroads of thought, and the idea makes me chuckle.
I mean, sure. I suppose humans can be considered beautiful. We help others (and sometimes selflessly! Imagine that) and better the community. We're incredibly complex biological beings that somehow manage to incorporate genetic mutation into the gene pool, while still considering that deviation from the template as "unique".
However, I find humans to be much, much, much less than that. I doubt we deserve quite so much glorification in our description. I find that, though we're all unique, we're all equally not unique. No matter how different two people are, they're still made of the same basic materials: Meat, water, blood, sperm, eggs, mucus, and bacteria. Have you ever thought about that? There's so much of you that isn't actually you. You have a whole bunch of bacteria in you that is beneficial to you, that live in their own ecosystem inside your body and help you in some minuscule way.
We're all decomposing at the same general speed. We all die eventually.
But enough about the biological aspect of the species. What about society? I'm sure that everyone agrees that the general economy, regardless of which portion of land you may inhabit, sucks. This is because of greedy and dominant people. But what makes people dominant and greedy? To answer that question with another question: What makes good people helpful and charitable? I've found the answer to be rather simple: Lust. We are creatures of want and we have intelligence enough to not be able to cope with not getting what we want.
Picture this: A man sits behind a desk at work for the 97th consecutive business day. He has a family of four; a wife who loves him very much, a daughter who is going through the early stages of school, and a son who has just learned to walk. He sits behind a desk inside a large building owned by a very successful company. He makes good pay, is caught up with all of his bills, and seems to have quite a bit of luck, possibly inherited from a distant Irish cousin, since no real tragedies ever seem to happen to him. A man sits behind a desk and realizes that he is sick of his life, and that he'll probably be sitting behind a desk for the rest of his life.
During lunch break he decides to go across the street to buy some cigarettes from the local deli-mart. On the way in, he notices a homeless man holding a sign that says "Please help anything helps God bless". As per standard societal operating procedure, the man goes inside without paying the stranger any mind. He pays for his cigarettes and walks back outside. He looks up at his looming office building and realizes that he can't smoke the cigarettes inside, so he lights up right outside the deli-mart. As he stands there thinking about how lost and hopeless his life is, he spots the homeless man for the second time, and on a spur of the moment decides to pull out his wallet, open it up, and hand the stranger the entirety of it's contents. The stranger looks at all of the money in his hand with a blank expression, the same expression that inhabits the faces of people witnessing a plane crash in a setting other than their living room. The stranger makes a show of getting up, starts to thank the man profusely, and them immediately walks into the deli-mart. The man throws his cigarette onto the floor and walks across the street, headed back to his beige-walled office, back to his desk. The entire way there, he feels a blossoming warmth in the bottom of his esophagus. He feels like he might start crying, but he thinks that would be an absurd thing to do, given how happy he's feeling. The rest of his day goes by in a blur, and he comes home energetically and actually enjoys spending time with his family for once.
Through the course of his life, he helps more and more people. He works on finding creative ways to help those in need. Why does he do it? He does it because he's an emotion junkie. He found something rare, something you can't buy or hoard or find on Google. He likes feeling nice, and he can't stop. He's greedy for something he doesn't get often.
Now compare him to a Big-business CEO, who makes six figures a year without doing much. Perhaps he led a childhood of being poor for whatever reason. One day he gets a relatively small amount of money, but to him it's like motherfucking Christmas up in this bitch, and henceforth recognizes the acquiring of money as a good feeling. For the rest of his life, he works as hard as he can to get as much money as he can. In this standpoint, he's no different from the man who helps other people almost selflessly. They are both people simply doing whatever they can to feel good.
TL;DR, each individual person is their own unique little snowflake, and yet we're all made of H20 that's below 32 degrees Fahrenheit.
Has anyone had thoughts like this?
-merged double post. -Emerald Dream
I mean, sure. I suppose humans can be considered beautiful. We help others (and sometimes selflessly! Imagine that) and better the community. We're incredibly complex biological beings that somehow manage to incorporate genetic mutation into the gene pool, while still considering that deviation from the template as "unique".
However, I find humans to be much, much, much less than that. I doubt we deserve quite so much glorification in our description. I find that, though we're all unique, we're all equally not unique. No matter how different two people are, they're still made of the same basic materials: Meat, water, blood, sperm, eggs, mucus, and bacteria. Have you ever thought about that? There's so much of you that isn't actually you. You have a whole bunch of bacteria in you that is beneficial to you, that live in their own ecosystem inside your body and help you in some minuscule way.
We're all decomposing at the same general speed. We all die eventually.
But enough about the biological aspect of the species. What about society? I'm sure that everyone agrees that the general economy, regardless of which portion of land you may inhabit, sucks. This is because of greedy and dominant people. But what makes people dominant and greedy? To answer that question with another question: What makes good people helpful and charitable? I've found the answer to be rather simple: Lust. We are creatures of want and we have intelligence enough to not be able to cope with not getting what we want.
Picture this: A man sits behind a desk at work for the 97th consecutive business day. He has a family of four; a wife who loves him very much, a daughter who is going through the early stages of school, and a son who has just learned to walk. He sits behind a desk inside a large building owned by a very successful company. He makes good pay, is caught up with all of his bills, and seems to have quite a bit of luck, possibly inherited from a distant Irish cousin, since no real tragedies ever seem to happen to him. A man sits behind a desk and realizes that he is sick of his life, and that he'll probably be sitting behind a desk for the rest of his life.
During lunch break he decides to go across the street to buy some cigarettes from the local deli-mart. On the way in, he notices a homeless man holding a sign that says "Please help anything helps God bless". As per standard societal operating procedure, the man goes inside without paying the stranger any mind. He pays for his cigarettes and walks back outside. He looks up at his looming office building and realizes that he can't smoke the cigarettes inside, so he lights up right outside the deli-mart. As he stands there thinking about how lost and hopeless his life is, he spots the homeless man for the second time, and on a spur of the moment decides to pull out his wallet, open it up, and hand the stranger the entirety of it's contents. The stranger looks at all of the money in his hand with a blank expression, the same expression that inhabits the faces of people witnessing a plane crash in a setting other than their living room. The stranger makes a show of getting up, starts to thank the man profusely, and them immediately walks into the deli-mart. The man throws his cigarette onto the floor and walks across the street, headed back to his beige-walled office, back to his desk. The entire way there, he feels a blossoming warmth in the bottom of his esophagus. He feels like he might start crying, but he thinks that would be an absurd thing to do, given how happy he's feeling. The rest of his day goes by in a blur, and he comes home energetically and actually enjoys spending time with his family for once.
Through the course of his life, he helps more and more people. He works on finding creative ways to help those in need. Why does he do it? He does it because he's an emotion junkie. He found something rare, something you can't buy or hoard or find on Google. He likes feeling nice, and he can't stop. He's greedy for something he doesn't get often.
Now compare him to a Big-business CEO, who makes six figures a year without doing much. Perhaps he led a childhood of being poor for whatever reason. One day he gets a relatively small amount of money, but to him it's like motherfucking Christmas up in this bitch, and henceforth recognizes the acquiring of money as a good feeling. For the rest of his life, he works as hard as he can to get as much money as he can. In this standpoint, he's no different from the man who helps other people almost selflessly. They are both people simply doing whatever they can to feel good.
TL;DR, each individual person is their own unique little snowflake, and yet we're all made of H20 that's below 32 degrees Fahrenheit.
Has anyone had thoughts like this?
-merged double post. -Emerald Dream