Chapter 16: Why it matters that you are a human animal

Greeting, hypothetical newborn baby!  I have returned with yet another lesson on a most ambitious topic: the meaning of life . . . Just kidding. That would be so very pretentious because I don't even claim to understand that question.  Instead, I'm here once again to teach you some of the many Life Lessons I was forced to learn at the School of Hard Knocks. These are ideas that I constantly lean on in order to navigate my way through life so far, and I'm in my 65th year, which ought to be worth something. This is my sixteenth lesson and you can find all my lesson here. 

Back in Chapter 4, I broke it to you that you are an animal. Back in Chapter 11, I further broke to you that you are not some sort of half-ethereal magical hybrid. You are not a god who burps and farts. You are a humble yet honorable ape about to strut your way across a cosmic stage that is about 80 years long.

Here are three very important things about you, all of them related to your animality:

We've discussed all of these things a bit but we are nowhere close to being done with these hot topics.  In fact, they are so incredibly hot that many people complain that reading them makes it feel like their heads are about to explode. Most of these complainers aren't comfortable that they are made of biomass. They know in a very personal way that they are animals, because they eat and poop and procreate in ways similar to many of the animals they see on David Attenborough's nature documentaries  They know all of this, but they don't like it one bit, which will be explore in a later chapter on Terror Management Theory. Large numbers of people want to pretend that their thought process somehow floats over their bodies, boundless and free to think thoughts entirely unrelated to the exquisitely complex operation of their three-pound brains. They prefer to think of themselves as gods with pimples and anuses and smartphones.

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