To live or not to live - that isn't really a question.

"What is it that drives YOU?"

"Why do you bother taking that next step?"

"Why don't you just sit down, loose the will to live and die?"

These are questions that hold meaning beyond the ordinary realm of the mundane* (I shall come back to the whole concept of mundane a little later) life and it would do you some good if you took the time to sit down and actually think about them.

Now, the most common answer is that you just don't want to cease, that you do things because you 'must' and because, well, because. But really, these answers are really just questions with regression built in: "Why 'must' you?"

I mean, consider this for a moment: The milky way contains a hundred billion stars and at least as many planets. The known universe contains a hundred billion galaxies. Thats 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 stars. You are a lump of biological matter, weighing between 40 (eat some food damnit!) and 200 kilograms (Though, I admit, if you are near the end of that scale you do gain cosmic significance) on the third planet from a completely normal, ordinary, sun. Nothing you do or don't do will make any difference to the universe at large. And really, whats the point of making a difference in the first place?

The reason for this 'must', this (on the surface) unreasonable, illogical and rather silly desire is simple enough: We 'must' because we 'must'. Hold on, that isn't as idiotic as it sounds. The complete(-ish) argument goes like this: If we didn't want to live and do things (heh!) we wouldn't try as hard. People who didn't try as hard wouldn't, for example, run quite as fast when being chased by a pack of Smilodon***. And thus, they were much less likely to survive. The people who did survive would have been the one who wanted to live more and so would their children. Take that mechanism and give it three billion years and presto: we have us.

What does that mean? Simply: WE really really want to live and, as a derivative of that mechanism, do things that sound 'meaningful'. And are like that because it is a mostly universal feature of life**. Do note that meaningful is highly subjective - look at Marlyn Manson as an example..........

So, that brings us back to the first question: "Why do you live?". Which , as we have seen (or I have, at any rate...) is really:

"What feeble delusion of grandeur do you use to justify your desire to live and do whatever it is you do?"

*A note: Mundane supposedly comes from the latin 'Mundus', which means 'of the world'. It is a sad, sad thing that a word for the world (as a metaphor for reality) has come to mean 'boring'.

**Err, another note: 'to live' is really speaking, in biological terms: 'to let my genes survive'. What that means is that an idiot who kills himself for love (like several species of spider, except that spiders are interesting) does nothing that goes against my lil pet theory. :)

***And another: Smilodon was a pack hunting, lion sized, prehistoric cat.