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Comment by Jasamba | Hacker News Reader

The point is that I am an unwilling participant in an evolutionary unfolding of life that I could not even make sense of until Mr. Darwin figured it out. Isn't it absurd that you are a critical thinking being, thrown onto a random planet with a certain set of initial conditions and limited knowledge collected by a few generations before you? And being aware of this, we go around like it's no big deal, buy our starbucks coffee and go on to complain about the tax rates and suicidal muslims.

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What makes is absurd?

The planet isn't random, it is one that can sustain life in our form. That we don't know everything about our existence, that we have to piece it together as best we can, and share our findings with the next generation, is all very exciting and amazing and awesome to me. I guess I am just the type of person who loves open world games :)

Also, it makes me get less upset when I see shitty things in the world - the fact that life that is just evolving to survive can get our shit together as well as humanity has, is frankly pretty amazing and impressive.

I agree with you and you are right, the world games are amazing and fun, but how many of us are aware that these are just games? And what happens when one ties their human worth to 'winning' these said games in succession (cause obv one is never enough). I wish we could just take this time for what it is, a gift of time, as a commentor pointed out. I guess I've just been running into too many people desperately running to 'get ahead', 'prove themselves', 'gain respect and admiration', that they become blind to the fragile and fleeting nature of it all.

There is nothing inherent in our existence that makes us need to do those things (tie your human worth to 'winning', 'getting ahead', or 'proving yourself', etc), and the best part is that whether you define yourself by those things or not is completely up to you. You don't need to change anyone else in order to not do those things yourself; when you say 'I wish we could just take this time for what it is, a gift of time,' you can totally do that! There is nothing stopping you - you don't need to convince anyone else of that in order to live it yourself.

You lament that you run into so many people who care about those things, and they are blind to the fragile and fleeting nature of it all, but I am unsure why that is such a horrible thing. Everyone is going to choose their own meaning for their lives, and sure, some will choose things that I don't understand and I don't think are important. But that is their life, and them choosing to care about those things doesn't change your life. You are not bound by their preferences.

In fact, I think it is great that all different people have such varied opinions on what is important. I get to observe them all, and see what life would be like under various scenarios. The human existence is so amazing because we all get to lead our own separate little 'experiments' in how we should live our lives (what we should do, what we should care about), and then we can share with each other what we have learned while trying these things. Some of the experiments will be utter failures, and some will be successes. We can learn from them all.

It's not absurd, I enjoy existing over not existing.

If you want to leave, you're free to go.

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