More importantly, why do we ask?

What is is about the nature of being human that compels us to ask, as individuals and as a species, “Why are we here? What is our purpose? What are we here to accomplish? What does it all mean?”

We have to wonder why we ask ourselves these question, and indeed why these questions haunt and torment us and have done so for millennia, because in the cold light of reason, there is no logical reason to suppose there is any reason or purpose to our existence at all. This is especially true for those of us who are nontheistic and therefore have no creator in our worldview, and hence, nobody’s intentions to question, even just in our minds. Purpose, after all, implies intention, and there is no intention without an intender… no reason for an action without a reasoner. After all, we don’t ask what the purpose of an apple falling from a tree is, or ask the river why it runs. Motives are something you only find in living, thinking entities, be they gods or human beings. If a murder is committed, we jail the murderer, not his bullets or his gun.

So what is it that compels us human beings to seek a meaning to life? Why do we consistently and persistently ask ourselves what it all means and what it’s all for, and makes us incapable of being satisfied with the obvious truth of cosmic accident?

For the answer, we have to delve deep into our natures as members of a highly social and hierarchical species. We have tribal instincts that run extremely deep into the most primal layer of our psyches, instincts that drive us so deeply and strongly that, like fish who cannot see the current, we often have no idea they are guiding us.

This is why, when society breaks down, the basic unit of human society is revealing to not be the family, but the tribe. Human beings instinctively bands together for mutual protection, and even when all else is gone, they will continue to do so, whether you call them tribes, organized crime families, gangs, or nations.

Therefore, as individuals, we seek our place in the tribe. We search for a place where we have a role, responsibilities, and recognition for the effort we contribute, as well as the protection and support of the larger group (be it workplace, social scene, or fandom) in return for our contributions.

In short, we look for a place where we belong. Our entire driving for belonging is, at its root, a searching for our tribe, and our rightful, proper place in it. Modern society has broken down almost all of the sources of this much needed tribal context that sufficed through history (like social class, clan, tribe, church, and so on) and has, thus far, only come up with partial and ephemeral substitutes like clubs, social scenes, fandoms, and so on.

Our search for cosmic meaning, therefore, is this search for the place where we belong taken to the highest scale. Being social and hierarchical creatures, we cannot feel truly safe and secure unless we know where we stand in the tribal structures in which we experience our existence, and once we realized that the Universe was out there and vastly larger than anything our primate social minds can comprehend, our tribal instincts compelled us to seek our place in that social context as well.

And it doesn’t matter that we have no reason to believe that the question is even meaningful or sensible at that level. Our social instincts compel us, and they operate on a considerably deeper and more powerful level than relative latecomers like logic and reason.

That is why we cannot accept our existence as cosmic accident. In the socially constructed world of a social primate, purposeless things have no standing. Without the comfort of knowing our place in the cosmic tribe, we face the most terrifying thought possible to the mind of a social ape : that we have no place in the tribe at all, and therefore have no tribe.

A human being would rather be the lowest of the low, the untouchable of the untouchables, in a universe explicitly designed to cause them the most suffering possible, than to face the prospect of a universe with no particular place for us at all. Even Hell would be better than being a tribeless primate.

If you scratch the surface of many a nightmare vision of the world or the future, and know what to look for, you will see that the real appeal of these pessimistic, even nihilistic views of the world is that they nevertheless suggest an order in the world and a place for us in it, even if it is only as mindless pawn, feckless sheep, or cattle for the slaughter.

The only answers that, in the long run, can satisfy this tribal yearning are ones that we create ourselves. There is no grand cosmic purpose to our existence. We are not here for any particular reason any more than any other cluster of atoms swirling in the Void. There is no great and noble job for us to do, and if we but fulfill this cosmic purpose, the universe will protect us and reward us accordingly. This world does not come with a task already laid out for us, waiting for us to find it and fill it.

But that does not mean that we cannot have meaning and purpose in our lives. It just means that we must find it, indeed create it, ourselves. Once we accept the existential truth of the meaninglessness of human existence in the grand scheme of the cosmos, we are then freed from all obligations to find our cosmic purpose, as well as any potential penalties from our failure to “do our jobs”, and we are free to do, be, or become whatever it is that our inner natures need us to be.

Our cosmic search for meaning is forever doomed, but we can still find comfort, meaning, and purpose in this great big beautiful world if we just set our sights a little lower.

And nobody can tell you that you aren’t being what you are supposed to be.

Supposed by who?