The secret of life suddenly came to me just the other day... and I was shocked by how easy and simple it was, and started wondering why I'd never heard it from anyone else before. The secret is, life is nothing except self-perpetuating. There is no meaning, there is no reason for us to be here, nothing we're supposed to accomplish, except to spawn more life.

The proof for this is that humans evolved (or were created, either way it doesn't really matter) specifically so that we take pleasure only in things that our brains think will help us survive or procreate, and we only get pain from things that our brain think will have the opposite effect. The most obvious examples of things that stimulate the pleasure center are: eating, drinking and fucking... obviously, these are the best ways for convincing your brain that you're doing something to sustain yourself, or create new life.

"But wait," you say, "I also get pleasure from things that aren't so base, like being around my friends, or playing sports, or listening to music, or winning court cases." Well, being around friends caters back to the whole herd instinct phenomenon we see in "lesser" animals: when you're in a group among people you trust, you're less likely to get killed or weakened in some way. When you play sports or exercise, you're making your body more fit, increasing your ability to survive against predators, defeat competetors, and take down prey.

When you listen to music (or stimulate any of your senses, actually), you're exercising part of your sensory intake, which prevents it from going into atrophy (which would be a bad thing, because less sensory ability means less chance of knowing that a predator or prey or enemy or mate is around. this is also why people in sensory-deprivation tanks start going nuts after a few days).

And by winning court cases, or proving yourself intellectually superior in any other way, the herd instinct part of your brain rewards you, not for just being smarter, but for being smarter in the eyes of many people, including your competition, putting you in a leadership position. Competition exists because the brain rewards power and leadership, and this is because an animal that's content is more likely to make wise decisions and be able to convince others to do what it wants (would you be more attracted to someone with a smile on their face, or someone wearing a scowl?). Failure causes unhappiness, not only to make people try to win all the harder next time, but because a low sense of self-worth causes people to doubt themselves, and thus follow a leader when split-decisions have to be made. United, a pack of animals is more likely to survive and/or conquer than if individual members each think they have the best idea of what to do and split up.

And then, of course, there's the whole spirituality thing, and people say "Well, I derive pleasure from praying or having faith in my religion, or whatever." I see two main reasons why people get pleasure from religion:

  1. Having faith in some explanation for who made the world and why we're all here satisfies natural human curiosity... and of course, human curiosity exists because knowing more about the world increases your chances of surviving in it.
  2. Most religions promise some kind of after-life, and this quells the fear of death which stems from the fact that we're programmed to desire life.
And that's about it. The secret of life is, that it serves only itself.

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