I would like to circle back to my opening question: why do we live? By live, I don’t mean exist. There is a difference between living and existing. To exist, I think, is to simply fulfill basic needs. You exist when you eat, sleep, reproduce, and die. Animals exist. Do they live? I suppose we’ll have to take that up in another meditation. Living, however, is something more. It is having goals beyond simple survival and reproduction. Living is having passions and hobbies and desires and choices. We could all simply exist, but most of us choose to live. Perhaps this is a virtue of having an incredibly powerful brain. It might be simply impossible for a human to simply exist. Let us then, for the sake of argument, assume that humans have different capacities than animals which enables them to live rather than exist.
Why, then, do we do it? Well, I would imagine that it’s something innate. There is something restless in the human soul, brain, or body that propels us to act on these abilities that we have. Perhaps it is something like John Stuart Mill envisioned — a unique set of faculties that must be developed just as animals must eat. It certainly seems impossible to imagine any human being content with just eating and sleeping. Even though millions of people are forced into that life, it is not what they want. It then seems, certainly, like there is some intrinsic drive within humans to want more than just existence. To deprive ourselves of those desires is to deprive ourselves of something as basic as food. To resign yourself to existence, then, goes against our very biological nature. That, I suppose, is part of why we live.
Before we go too far, I’d like to take a step back and establish a couple of things. I refrain from calling these anything but meditations. There is no clear order, nor is there a clear argument. As I said, they are simply topics that come into my head. I may make normative claims, but they are not asserted with the intent to prove. This is not meant to be a philosophical argument about the nature of life and meaning: it is instead my journey to find that. So if these thoughts aren’t perfectly defended or perfectly fleshed out, that is entirely acceptable with me, and hopefully with you.
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