Is our life our life?

Life is one of the most fascinating and engaging concepts that has tickled our minds since the beginning of mankind. Fear of death is one of the basic, underlying concerns that we all have. Various philosophies, religions, and sciences have tried to explain and “solve” these issues.

It seems to me that we tend to think more about life and death at later stages of our lives. When we are young, we think that we will never get old. When we are healthy, we feel that we will never get sick. We tend not to think much in advance – it's in our nature, I guess. Inevitably though, we all begin to wonder.

I consider religion to be a good phenomenon since all major religions basically encourage people to behave in a decent way (except when some scripts are understood in a too literal, zealot way, resulting in violence and/or individual freedom constraints). Nonetheless, I have never been a religious person; that approach doesn’t work for me because I find it hard to “choose” to believe in something that obviously confronts basic logic. No Heaven / Jannah / Valhalla for me.

I wanted to share with you a “solution” that works well for me. I like to think that our individual lives are just parts of a much bigger life – evolution. We are distant relatives to all forms of life on our planet, including monkeys, wolves, whales, orcas, dolphins, minnows, flowers, and trees. The life as a whole, as the evolution, as the ecosystem whose part we are, continues long before and after our individual “death”. Thus, we are a little bit of everyone, human, animal, and plant alike, and we all contribute to and enjoy a bit of the ongoing, uniform life.

I find this attitude both logical and stress-relieving, since it reminds us that we, both as the individuals and as the human race, are not a center or some crucial figure of the universe, making it easier for us to focus on feeling happiness about our existence for as long as it lasts.

If you liked this post, then you would probably also like my recent article: What is the real value of money and how it relates to Maslow's hierarchy of needs.

Disclaimer: I don't own any rights to the images used in this article. I just found them online and wanted to share them with you.