One thing that fascinates me a great deal is why we grow old. Its a funny find of question but I think it ranks up there with why do we die and why do we live.
I was sitting in a sort of dinner and eating my lunch and a old couple sat down just in front of me. It was obvious they had been married or together for a long time and well, they were growing old together. Now the thing about living is that you start off new and you grow old. You adapt to the experiences you encounter by gaining knowledge. This knowledge in effect then helps you to do more in your life: A baby who learns how to communicate can ask for food. A person who’s been outdone in a certain scenario will most likely learn from that encounter and modify their outcome the next time round. Experiences and knowledge go hand in hand at getting older. It appears that the older you get, the more experiences you encounter and perhaps more importantly, the more you remember and learn from those experiences. So living longer should make you wiser, have more capabilities - in terms of having had more opportunities to learn to do/deal with a larger variety of things. So why do we learn and gain more knowledge as we grow older? For what purpose? And then, why do we die at the end?
I’ve always thought that there must be a purpose for humans to be alive and to live. I have a theory that every human has a lifetime, to grow old and acquire the knowledge that they do, hence a reason for growing old is that something must be done with that knowledge. But what?
Practically speaking in terms of resources on in the world we live on Earth, you can’t live forever because you’ll utilize all the resources up eventually. So perhaps we die to give the next set of humans the ability to learn, grow old and endeavour to try again to achieve whatever human kind are supposed to(And I don’t know what that is).
Death does seem like a ‘re-go’ or a ‘re-attempt’ by humanity to try again. The longest lifespan of humans in not very much longer than 100 years. Why? Why would stopping a 100 year life time of accumulated knowledge and experience be beneficial? Perhaps a human’s purpose must be achieved within a time frame, if they don’t do it then die and recycle the next human ie. birth.
If we had to follow this rationale, its intruiging to think that whatever we/humankind are to do in this world, it must be done in a limited time. Why? Sure, perhaps one reason why is because we’d not be able to sustain ourselves and if we kept having children and no-one died and thus we’d not give the Earth time to re-grow its resources for the next humans to consume...
Maybe all humans don’t die because they’ve failed to achieve a global/universal purpose, like I was suggesting – perhaps they just need to have done something in their life time and then dyeing is purely so the next batch of humans can have the same opportunity to live and breath and eat (use some earth resources) but crucialy learn new things now that the previous generation could not(due to technological improvements now). Then what is a newly borth human’s purpose for living? Is it the same as the next or is it individual?
All humans(well most) do very similar tasks in life. They grow, learn, apply learning, reproduce and die. The ‘apply learning’ is something that might be contributing to our purpose otherwise we would not do it,same with reproduction. One thing that does happen when we die however is that we can leave knowledge behind for the next humans. So this means humanity can evolve by the combined experiences of all those who left useful/reusable knowledge behind when they died. If that’s our purpose then to what end are humans evolving for?
Is our purpose as humans just to contribute to the evolution of the human race -its overall ability, its skill-set, its existence? You could almost see each human’s life as an attempt to level-up the general skill of humanity. So if we live and die to progress and evolve humanity for the next generation – why?
Why evolve humanity, to what end? Is there a point at which a certain level of evolution would be useful – and to whom and for what reason. The people who die don't seem to benefit from human evolution. Perhaps living is their reward? Who has a vested interest in the evolution of humankind?
What is humanity evolving for? I guess, if you had to look a microbe – it kinda does the same thing but does it know why it reproduces? Is its purpose also to evolve.. Why?
Perhaps the act of living and being alive cannot be learnt in one lifetime, because its always changing. So we’re always learning and evolving to keep up with how to stay alive this time around(which might be subtly diffirent last time, say the last 100 years of the previous generation's lifetime). Perhaps that's our purpose in life – to merely sustain a concept called life or living. The purpose of evolution is to live. Why live?
And to do this we must continually live, learn, share, die and so continuing a process of sharing life experiences this time so that next time others don’t need to do so and they can learn from it and gain the new changes in the life that it now requires to survive?
Perhaps the challenges we’ve faced in our past, racism, wars, treatment of animals, terrorism all in some way during our lifetimes contribute to evolving humanity to stay alive for longer and longer until perhaps the sun stops shining or the universe stops or something.
Perhaps that’s the biggest purpose in life – to stay alive.
Being alive is pretty great but do humans die to evolve?
Do we evolve to continue living? Why do we live? Who follows our progress?
Why must we die?