Sebas van den Brink - grafisch ontwerp, vormgeving, video/animatie, illustratie

The reason to live: Compost.

It’s so simple. It came to me yesterday night when I was trying to fall asleep. Like some eureka moment or “divine inspiration”. It’s the text to an imaginary speech. Not that I regulary speak infront of large crowds, I do enjoy giving presentations though. Maybe I have a little bit of a showman in me. Basically it’s how I would sum up why we should live peacefully and take care of each other. Yeah I know, I too get tired of hearing how we have to save the planet all the damn time - but we know Earth knows very well how to save herself.

Anyway, I reasoned about the reason why us hoo-mans are alive. And it is simple. Compost. Yep. Now don’t scurry away pointing at me telling your friends “He’s probably one of them hippies, he is,” because i’m not. Let’s just compare ourselves to that other living material; flora. When a plant dies it falls to the ground where it serves a new purpose. That of food for other living things, other plants mostly. Humans are the same. Not only do we leave chemicals behind when our bodies decompose, but we have something else. Something only our superior brains can leave behind.

You see, humans can see structures. We can even build these. We can create systems and tools. Especially the tool bit is quite important to our survival. An ape is built to climb and swing between trees - we’re hardly good at that. And fish are specialists when it comes to swimming and breathing under water. We need tools for that. But thanks to our larger neocortex, we managed to excel in communication and creativity. Much more than our nearest relatives, the chimpanzees. Humans can create tools to create tools to create tools - and so on. Basically, everything is a tool. The building you live in is a tool in the sense that it keeps you dry and holds all your stuff. It provides shelter. A hammer is a tool in a more simple sense; you can wield it to drive a nail into the wall or hit yourself on the thumb. A house you can wield to shelter yourself from all sorts of dangers (like taxmen - keep those curtains drawn!)

One of these tools we create are media. You can wield these tools to pass on knowledge. And this is where we differ from animals. Chimpanzees can learn from each other by imitation - as do human babies. But they do not write that stuff down and tell their children, do they? It’s all instict. Humans have instinct. But we also have this huge neocortex in our brain (a third layer) which can partially override instinct. A simple example; you are hungry. You feel this in your tummy, it’s your body telling you you need nutrients. But you are at work and it’s nearly five. An animal would go get food, no matter the time. But you know that you’re almost done with that report - then you can go get food and quell that darn feeling.

Thanks to our neocortex we are able to do the things that animals cannot - or cannot do in such complex manners. Chimpanzees do fashion simple tools, but humans go far beyond that. We create knowledge. We even look for it. Then we write it down. And that’s where the tools come in. To write stuff down you need a carrier - a medium - and something to chisel, paint or write with. And of course a language - not to be forgotten. Then you need to store it somewhere - a building.

So when we die - and we all die, still - what we leave behind is knowledge. A ghost of our existence in the form of written history. At least that’s what some have left behind. Think of Socrates, Plato, Freud even Hitler. But we all know his compost smells really bad and we have to stay far away from it. Not a lot of cute hedgehogs hiding in that heap! But we still know the names of these people, even thousands of years after they were alive. Think of the pharaos; Aknaton, Tutanchamon, Ramses. We still know their names even though they died thousands of years ago.

In that sense, these people have become immortal.

Not only that, they (all of them) have furthered our understanding of human life and the world. Mathematics, economics, language, politics. These were all invented by the ancients. The ancient Greek of Athens, the ancient Egyptians.

Nowadays human knowledge is simply vast. There’s so much written down (a lot of meaningless crap aswell) that our encyclopedia are really of mythical proportians. Just try to think how big the internet must be, or check out Wikipedia’s vast knowledge repositories. Even Google “knows” a lot. If we manage to hold on the zillions of bits of information that we now have, humans could excel in anything. I truly think that.

So with all that knowledge we should live in Utopia, right? Wrong. There’s one hitch; politics. Politicians to be precise. The nasty, money motivated ones in particular. It’s a profession in which it’s important that you are some kind of role-model, even if it’s pure propaganda that makes you look like one. That’s why politicians (governments) should always fear journalists. These are the professionals on the other side of the balance. They work to get that scoop, to get that story about that politician who molests children. Independent journalism is - next to education, water, air and healthcare - essential to a nation. Alas in some countries they don’t have to anymore, even the US is in troubled water when it comes to the quality of the press. This is destroying a precious balance.

You see, even a child knows that war is bad. War. Is bad. Any kid will tell you this. It causes casualties, traumas, damages, psychological problems and general turmoil throughout the world. Yet aging men in politics (they’re still usually men) seem to have forgotten this simple bit of knowledge.

They gain their “knowledge” from the synthetic fertilizer thrown to them by “friends”.