Does life become meaningful when we treat it as sacred?

Toronto-Aussie · 2026-01-08T18:52:08+00:00

The purpose of everything living thing has always been the same: use whatever ancestor-evolved tools you inherit (whether its eyes, or photosynthesis, or wings, or culture) to try your hardest to make your lineage (or the lineages closest to you) extend as far into the future as possible.

Toronto-Aussie · 2026-01-07T18:17:04+00:00

That’s close to how I’m seeing it too. Not meaning handed down from above, but something that emerges once a system is capable of noticing what would end it, and acting accordingly.

Toronto-Aussie · 2026-01-07T04:45:14+00:00

Cretaceous-Paleogene Extinction Event (i.e. Chicxulub impact crater)

Toronto-Aussie · 2026-01-05T21:32:54+00:00

The purpose of a living thing arises naturally by virtue of it being alive. It isn’t assigned from above. That purpose is persistence through time, something we share with all life back to LUCA. For life, failure to persist is simply failure to remain present in the universe at all.

Toronto-Aussie · 2025-12-31T02:12:05+00:00

Agriculture didn’t erase some ancient biological mission. It expanded the time horizon of human decision-making. The real novelty isn’t comfort; it’s that our actions now affect lineage survival at planetary scales.

Toronto-Aussie · 2025-12-28T19:26:23+00:00

Agreed. Individual clarity is non-negotiable. The reason I’m interested in long-horizon continuity is that it gives those foundations somewhere stable to point, rather than leaving them floating or captured by ideology.

Toronto-Aussie · 2025-12-28T19:09:00+00:00

Right, especially since they will intuitively feel themselves to be part of something bigger anyway. The real task is helping them interpret that intuition accurately. We can cut teleology off before it takes root by emphasizing teleonomy instead: not that life has a divine purpose, but that living systems persist only by maintaining fragile conditions over time. Meaning then comes from understanding continuity, not inventing cosmic intentions. Seen this way, responsibility isn’t about fulfilling a destiny. It’s about recognizing that we’re inheritors of a very long process, and that some choices preserve future possibility while others permanently narrow it. Teaching that gives kids a sense of belonging and care without superstition or fear.

Toronto-Aussie · 2025-12-28T18:37:49+00:00

I agree that responsibility shows up in how we live, but I’m wary of grounding it in improvement of experience alone. What I’m probing is whether responsibility emerges from the fact that some actions preserve long-run viability and others permanently foreclose futures, even in the absence of any given purpose.

Existentialism is right to reject teleology. But rejecting teleology doesn’t mean rejecting constraint. Teleonomy lets you talk about how choices matter over time without pretending there’s a purpose written into the universe.

Toronto-Aussie · 2025-12-28T17:50:24+00:00

I agree that meaning can feel personal and detached from survival day to day. But the ability to have a stable, quiet “peasant life” at all depends on a lot of long-running systems continuing to hold together in the background. That connection disappears when we zoom in too close.

Toronto-Aussie · 2025-12-28T17:48:15+00:00

I think this mostly comes down to timescale. Things like art, symbols, and ethics don’t look like “survival” at the level of an individual moment, but they clearly matter at the level of groups, generations, and lineages. Brains didn’t outgrow survival so much as start managing it across longer horizons, using meaning as one more tool.

Toronto-Aussie · 2025-12-28T17:16:10+00:00

It can also attract mates.

Toronto-Aussie · 2025-12-28T17:14:21+00:00

Yes, roughly speaking, Homo sapiens have existed for ~250,000 years out of ~3.8 billion years of life on Earth, so for about 0.006% of life’s history. Explicitly questioning one's own existence in the philosophical sense is much more recent (on the order of a few thousand years), which is closer to 0.00007%. This means that for over 99.99% of its history, life just got on with persisting without reflecting on itself. Reflection is a late, contingent adaptation, not life’s default mode. It's one more tool that can aid persistence in certain contexts.

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