Who are we? This question can become the answer to almost every other question about the world. Humans are particles, atoms, complex, carefully crafted, scientific, social, impossible, obvious, difficult, simple, cruel, insignificant, controlling, grasping, hopeful, hopeless, driven.

 

At the base level, humans are animals. We are creatures created by the universe or by chance or by some force that we have never dreamed of. We move by instinct, steered by signals exchanged between our brains and our bodies. Our bodies, once diseased and old, fail us, because we are in one sense no more than our bodies; our thoughts and persona -- some people call them souls -- become imprinted onto the creatures who surround us and, in another sense, never die.

 

We are a miniscule part of a galaxy so large that we fade into a space so small that we can’t ever stop and think because there’s so much noise, because there are so many voices brought to life by vocal chords that were mutations once and came into universal being by evolution over a time so long that our life spans represent emptiness.

 

When you view the Earth from that far away, that is all we are. Specks, bits, nothing, just like a point on a Euclidean graph that was made up to make sense of the world by another human: so small that it can never be accurately represented, but replaced all the same by a dot of ink infinitely times larger than the reality.

 

But when you zoom in, it’s hard to have that perspective. Because we are suddenly overwhelmed by so much, by the endless meaningless meaningful words you can’t escape from, by the way that people make art and music with their evolutionized brains, by self-proclaimed scientists making up more words for another wonder that they “discovered,” by variations of people who call themselves government trying to control an insignificant body, by the constant pressure to be happy, to be successful by a standard determined by someone nobody can remember.

 

By the masses looking up to a deity who doesn’t exist and making circles and praying and lecturing and judging and living their tiny lives by the words of a book written by someone just as small as them, all because they cannot bear to live with the idea that they were not created for a reason, which they weren’t.

 

So we strive to achieve impossible and made-up perfection; what else is there to do?