Why read this? Not because of who I am. Because you wonder what other's think about why we are the way we are. Here's my theory. Please tell me where I'm wrong in your opinion and experience.
First, we are a product of evolution. We are billions of people each consisting of dozens of organs each made up of billions of cells. We have perfected this arrangement over the centuries by reproducing what works, and diluting what doesn't. We are the world leaders in the race to see who can best capture the resources needed to be what we are. I'll let others opine where all of this is on the scale of good or bad, I'll just accept it as the way things are.
None of us can do much about what evolution has brought to our personal set of organs. We can maintain what we inherited (or not). We can do what we can do with much conscious thought or coast through life reacting. We can grab our share of what we need and rejoice in our victories or we can consider impacts outside of us and leave the world when our turn is over better than we found it. No matter what we do we have very limited time before it's someone else's race.
I suspect many people reading this will start to chafe about now because so far this description treats us as colonies of cells and chemical factories that are born as we are, reproduce, then duck out. While that is all true it seems awfully incomplete. What are we beside the collection of cells our ancestors handed down to each of us?
I would like to work on that question considering a simplified vision of what anthropologists label "culture". To make things as simple as possible I would define culture as anything we learn from others about what life should be. It may be related to education, but in my mind it's less factual, less formal, and learned without effort by exposure to those people life throws us closest to.
What do you think life should be?
