Joy (pt. 2)

Survival has something to recommend itself, since survival is a necessary precondition to anything else. But that’s really not that great a point, is it? You wouldn’t say the meaning of life is to have a skull, would you? But without your skull, where would you be? Also not alive.

Necessities are, apart from being necessary, not significant enough to serve when you ask yourself to state your business here.

Pursuit of necessity can certainly be descriptive of human behaviors, unlike, to stay with the example, the pursuit of having a skull. A person pretty much automatically has a skull, and few interesting skull-seeking behaviors exist in human history. There has not been a fascinating and diverse unfolding of ways to go about getting and keeping one’s skull. But there has, in the case of survival, been a lot of data that has piled up, an awful lot of data. But it is just data, and it does not describe your purpose.

If your question is historical, sociological, physiological, or etc. then survival and propagation may be something of a be all and end all: a root source to which diverse branches may be retraced. But, again, survival is not the purpose of living. Survival is the platform, the collapse of which you will go to tremendous lengths to avoid, yes, but when you stand on the platform of your own survival, you have not yet arrived at yourself, at what you are meant to be.