11 ms·
It might be a bit preposterous to say what humans were meant to do or not to do, especially given that with a sample size of n = 1 we have humans actually wonde
by cmehdy 6y ago
It might be a bit preposterous to say what humans were meant to do or not to do, especially given that with a sample size of n = 1 we have humans actually wondering about such things.
Existential anxiety isn't per se about the relative size of self to the world but more about the inability to grasp and control the understanding of it. Pretty much everything living strives to "control" things, and in the case of human beings this applies to mental things too. Controlling things on a mental level is usually about understanding them, not necessarily about bending them to our will.
Anxiety is tied to a difficulty in dealing with perceived lack of control (over others, over our emotions, over the future..), and existential anxiety is an example of anxiety when it comes to existence. We simply don't know enough to say something that cements control.
Thankfully one of the coping mechanisms is humour, so I'll leave the reader with the very well known Douglas Adams bit:
“The story so far:
In the beginning the Universe was created.
This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move.”
- maze-le 6y agoThe sentence you object to was not thought of as a teleological dogma of what humanity is meant to do or not, but an evolutionary perspective of why our brains are not very well equipped to handle some questions and/or scales of such dimensions (maybe it wasn't the most apt expression -- I am not a native English speaker). The sensory and processing equipment that has evolved by giving early hominids the advantage to use tools and language stumbles somehow when it is confronted with the vastness of the universe -- it loses track of the local reference frame...