Microorganisms and the Meaning of Life

You and I are quite different from a protist or a bacterium. We dream, cry, and laugh. We make art, play games, and tell stories. We’re orders of magnitude bigger than a protist. That said, don’t we follow the same cycle of life they do? We’ve evolved and created a world where we can enjoy life rather than struggle with every fiber of our being just to stay alive, but aren’t we only surviving so the next generation can come into existence? No amount of technology or comfort can change the fact that, as individual organisms, our time is limited. We eat, reproduce, and eventually die. In that respect, the amoebae in the pond out back are exactly the same as us. Whether your size is measured in meters or micrometers, the desire to stay alive and reproduce comes baked into you. The question this essay will try to answer is why? What are we all, from the most minute to the most enormous, doing this for?

The first solution humans have arrived at is God. We know we didn’t create everything, but we can’t find anyone on Earth who’s responsible for this mess. Therefore, there must be some higher power that has placed us and a multitude of other creatures on a rock in the middle of nowhere. Our existence is inherently absurd, to put it in the words of Albert Camus. Religion is a comforting solution to our problem, as evidenced by the uncountable number of people who have subscribed to any of the many belief systems found throughout human history. While religion may assuage our existential dread, the lack of conclusive evidence of a divine presence makes it less than satisfactory as an answer to our question. There’s simply no indisputable proof of any divine figure’s existence. Humans have fought countless wars over whose god is the right one; we can’t even agree on what God is, so how can we credit everything to him?

Another view is that there is no alternative to the cycle of life as we know it—that the desire to live is as natural as the orbits of the planets of our solar system. This argument is consoling in the same way the idea of God is, but still doesn’t give a concrete explanation to our question. In fact, this idea is effectively the same as the idea of religion. By removing the humanoid deity from the picture, we shift the blame to the cosmos, letting the stars stand in for God. To a die-hard atheist, however, the reduction of this argument to that of the second paragraph may not be convincing.

To hedge our bets, let’s assume life (and its fundamental pattern) is inevitable, i. e. let’s assume that the desire to live and reproduce is an intrinsic part of the universe. Bearing that in mind, we can then claim that regardless of how and when life formed, there was a defined sequence of events leading from the creation of the universe to that moment. However, later on in the sequence there will be a moment when our sun dies, taking all life on Earth with it. Thus, the presence of life on a timeline dating from the beginning of the universe to its end would be no more than a blip. Because we have no concrete evidence of life elsewhere in the universe, we must restrict the existence of life at any point to the relatively short period of time Earth has to support it. In the grand scheme of things, then, it appears the existence of life is more of an unintended byproduct of some other processes than a necessary step in the lifetime of the universe. That being the case, we can’t take the teleological, life-centered view that we must be here; we’re still left looking for the reason why we are.

But now we’re back to where we started. If we can’t attribute our presence to a higher power or the natural order of the universe, then there might not be any reason we’re here at all. Perhaps, due to some extraordinarily lucky physiochemical process, the first organisms might have unintentionally come into existence and somehow developed the mechanisms to produce more organisms. Billions of years later, humans happened to evolve and are now paying the price of this process with their sanity. This realization may be somewhat harrowing, dear reader, but I assure you that there is no need to panic. Instead of viewing ourselves as lost, we can view ourselves as free. Free to assign meaning to our lives however we see fit, to focus on the small things, the big things, or anything in between.

This reasoning may seem counterintuitive, so I will word it in the following way: nothing matters, but that means the fact that nothing matters doesn’t matter. Essentially, our original question is unanswerable and, consequently, our attempt to answer it is pointless. I urge the reader to view this revelation as positive and exciting instead of damning. Because there is no reason why we’re here, we’re awarded the ultimate freedom: we get to choose what we live for.