Self Importance

Today, as I contemplated my kids, I found myself celebrating the preciousness of human life and its intrinsic value. I thought that this world is better off with humanity than without it because humanity increases diversity in so many ways. And diversity is always interesting, as it provides variation to an otherwise monotonous and boring environment. As humans, we contribute to biological diversity just by the richness of our DNA but even more interestingly we also contribute to diversity of thought, opinion, personality, sound, smell, tone, emotion and vitality. 

That's when I caught myself thinking about my self importance in contrast. I realized that during some ranges of time, children depend completely on us individually for survival. Also, I recognized that this experience makes us vulnerable to think we are needed. But then, when kids become independent adults and need us no longer, what reason of existence lingers for us?

No, this can't be the ultimate reason of our existence, being needed. There's something else. By putting a monetary value to our work and ultimately to our personas, modern society is taking us to believe that our value depends on how much we are needed or depended upon, but this is not true. We are intrinsically valuable, even though our importance is not as huge as we'd like to think.  

After been watching The Walking Dead and other post-apocalyptic shows, I started reflecting on the ultimate and most important objective that we rationally have created for our planetary society, which is to save our selves from extinction in order to preserve the human species. Is this really the mother of all objectives? How important for the world is the continuation of our species? 

My thought was that we didn't consciously decide to come to existence as a species, but it happened anyway. If we would become extinct, a new intelligent species could surge in this world or not. But we have come to arrogantly believe that the whole universe needs us to save it and to make it meaningful, as if it couldn't be valuable and meaningful by itself, without humans. As it has been recorded from several civilizations in the past, we tend to make our own cosmological vision where we are the center of the known universe. 

Having said that, I do believe that the universe is a better place thanks to our existence and that it would be a huge loss if our species would become extinct. I believe this would be the case because the universe would lose diversity which has intrinsic value, but not because it needs us to make it a better place. 

This is not to say that we must not care about improving our surroundings and learning about the cosmos. On the contrary, I believe these are all very important and valuable objectives, but not for what they mean to the universe, but for what they mean to us personally. We have a conscience and we feel the necessity to express our inner light and music. This is part of our very essence. If we don't do it, we would be denying ourselves and wasting all the diversity that we can contribute to the universe. However, it is highly pretentious to believe that we are the only provider of value and diversity to the universe. I refuse to believe this any more.