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?

I have four things to report. First, is that my Perl script doesn't seem to want to work under windows anymore and I don’t want to know why. I just want it to work and it annoys me that doesn’t - it just stopped working, which is impossible because logic doesn't change unless you change it and I didn't – I am so annoyed with it.

I’m also unwell which might explain why I’m annoyed and trying to avoid fixing my Perl script because I know its not broken. My python script works just fine. 

I lost my voice the last couple of days and its been annoying too. I sounded like a ostrich. I got on the bus the other day to buy a ticket and the bus driver had to ask me again what fare I wanted. I sounded like the god father with strepsils.  I think my Perl script is also sick. We’re not having a good time right now and we don’t care. I think we’re feeling very sorry for ourselves.

I’ve been working on a web app that I ported from Java into C# but I’ve reached that pivotal time where I’ve just realised that Its finished and that I should really move on and leave it be. Ultimately I always come back around later on to move it onto the next stage but right now, I’m not with it. I just sat and started at it for about 2 hours the other day. Maybe all of this is because I’m unwell. I’ve not slept very well either because at night I sound like a dog fight. Ironically I also sounds like air craft being shot down out of the sky, Its annoying too.

I have also been having memorable dreams lately and usually I’m protected from them by forgetfulness. The last two dreams were hopeless weird but amazingly familiar. I enjoyed the most recent once but I cant remember why. Typical. 

This probably means I’m getting better.

I bought these sugar-free variants of cough syrup and throat lozenges and I must say, I think we’re moving up in the world!

Electric cars, sugar-free lozenges. Well done! I watched a program once about drug addicts and how their teeth are so bad because of drug intake and cough medicine, but  I think its mostly because of the amphetamine dependency...and not  But that just partly influenced my decision.  Though, I’m sure someone will invent a flavoured toothpaste that has sugar in it. It probably will or has but I’m too weak(read lazy) to look it up on the internet. I’m actually not that sick now and I’m much better.

I’ve not been working out for about 10 days now which is fine, I know from bitter experience that exercise does not help you get better.

Actually someone died at my pre-school once after playing netball with bronchitis. So I’m taking this opportunity not to die. That’s a true story and I’ve learnt from it.

And ultimately the rest is good for me, psychologically: Doing the same thing all the time can be tough on the mind and the body. Though I think all this rest is building up into a future super-crazy exercise spurt which I fear might result in an over enthusiastic kick-start which might pull a muscle or injure myself. I’ve done that before...

I need to be cautious and ease into it. I came back from South Africa once after two weeks of no gym and the first day back I hurt my calf. I was limping like a new born antelope and on account of me looking like one, I also had to stop running, which was a double whammy and it was sore. So maybe I wont do that again.

I’ve been reading up on D3.js to build cool interactive charts and visualizations. I got to the 3rd chapter and it was wearing me down – I attribute that to my temporary decline in health. Though I’ve been thinking about it during the day today which is a good sign that I’ll be back whizzing through the chapters very soon. I have a network layout visualization in my java app which I’d like port over to the c# app but because I adapted some prewritten code which bases the algorithm I used to generate the chart data and it itself relied on a query on the Neo4J database, which is funky,  I’ve got to rewrite it so its coming from MS SQL and I need to know exactly how I did it so I’m properly structuring node and edge data in JavaScript so I can recreate it in C# from scratch. Its quite interesting however.

I found myself in the City again after 12 months of being relatively out of the city. I’ve been fairly rural of late, working out in Buckinghamshire for the last 12 months(had my 7 year aniversery at Citrix yesterday) but it looks like I’m destined to head back inland.

Funny you think not much changes in the city but it does and you know what, I don’t think the city really cares how I feel about it. I always through that you’d grow close the the familiarities of a place that you’ve spent some time with and somehow think that It has a soul and personality... Nope. But I’m not surprised really. I’ve never really felt like the city ever owed me anything anyway – even the sense of what familiarity might afford you.

I guess I’ve learnt that before – nothing and no one owes you anything and you really are no one. What really counts is what you are to yourself, irrespective to where you find yourself. That’s a good thought.

Man, I didn’t even know the iPhone 10 was out.