You’re awesome. Aren’t you?

I have a confession to make. I’m a bit ashamed of it, but here it goes: When I’m in a meeting and I add something that nobody has considered before, I think: “Good job! That was clever.” How silly. No, not silly: how dumb.

Don’t you do that too? Don’t you arrive at work in the morning wondering what people are going to think about your work, your outfit, the fact that you arrived 5 minutes late, the awesome comment you said in the meeting, the kick-ass question you asked in the “all hands”?

Your mind is this bright machine full of wittiness and intelligence that others need to know, so its awesomeness can be spread like peanut butter.

We like to believe that we’re the center of the universe. Our mind is this bright machine full of wittiness and intelligence that others need to know, so its awesomeness can be spread like peanut butter. A mind living a life as interesting as the Kardashians’, but more than just one inch deep. A mind whose emotions everybody must preserve and cater to like a precious newborn.

A mind that controls the body, like engineers shape their creations. And these creations are super important because they’re our bodies, so they need to be as perfect and attractive as possible, to achieve what our minds think they want.

And our genes? What’s the role of our genes? They’re just this curious code that created the beautiful human being that each of us is — that you are. A detail at a microscopic level that only matters when visualizing some cool double helixes … and is a bit frustrating, because how come the healthcare system hasn’t figured out how to tweak it to make us superhumans? (They better do so before Alzheimer’s disease sets in on me.)

We got it exactly backwards.

That’s why so many of us are unhappy.

In reality, we are at the service of our genes. They evolved over millions of years.

Generation after generation.

Individual after individual.

Pitted against natural selection.

In a constant war to see which one could spread the broadest.

And fastest.

When male bees ejaculate, their penis explodes and then they die. Does that sound like great individuals amazed in their uniqueness? No. It sounds like a pretty cruel way to optimize for evolution. But they have no choice in the matter. They are who they are because of their genes.

In fact, we’re just the millionth iteration of software.

You are not the engineer. You are the engineered. One of 8 billion pieces of software running in the world right now. A million versions came before you, one for every generation. A million will come after you.

Our code is our genes, and nature is pitting us against other pieces of software — other humans — to see which one reproduces the most and the fastest. We have evolved into the pieces of meat that we are because of it. The more humans inherit your code and grow to spread it, the more your piece of code will spread. That’s the only reason your eyeballs are now reflecting the light of your screen.

So that’s it. You’re just one of millions of iterations of code that has evolved into pieces of meat that are great at spreading themselves, walking on the surface of an average rock gravitating around an average star of an average galaxy.

When you die, the iterations will continue without you. You only matter to a few other pieces of code, other pieces of meat, for a blip in time.

After that, your piece of code will disappear like version 2,091,203 of a now obsolete program. You don’t matter to nature.

That is liberating.

Nobody has grand schemes for you. Nobody can (or should) “expect” you to do anything. Nobody will remember you in three generations. You come from nothing. You will become nothing.

You don’t need to come up with some grandiose purpose because, honestly, you have none. No one can give your life purpose except for you. And you only need to come up with a purpose that you believe in.

You don’t need to come up with some grandiose purpose because, honestly, you have none. You only need to come up with a purpose that you believe in.

It doesn’t need to be good.

It doesn’t need to be unique.

It doesn’t need to be timeless.

As long as you believe it’s your purpose, you will be fulfilled by working toward it.

Since you don’t matter, you don’t have any responsibility to make your life a unique snowflake.

You just need to be as happy as you can be.

Nobody has bestowed upon you a reason to be alive, but you are alive. That is the gift. Your piece of software is running right now. Make the most of it.

For such a cruel joker, evolution has been kinder to us than to male bees. It has given us quite a gift, a nice piece of code running deep in our software: emotions. You can feel love, hatred, surprise, anger, fun, disgust, belonging, fear, happiness, sadness.… Our code has iterated its way into making us feel things. You have nothing to win or lose, except for harnessing these feelings to enjoy life in the little while that you’re on earth, in the short amount of time that your particular version of software will be running.

If we were male bees, there wouldn’t be many paths for enjoyment. But we aren’t. We’re humans.

Our code has evolved — in this magical way — to enable happiness.

If you look at how we’re coded, you’ll see a beautiful coincidence: All the ways to make yourself happy are tied to one thing. Love.

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The oxytocin that floods your brain when you’re hugging your partner, your children, your parents … the endorphins you release when laughing with friends around some beers … the dopamine rush you feel when a stranger smiles at you after you open the door for him … the serotonin you produce when beholding the millions of people enjoying the products that your company created…. You are programmed to experience happiness through all kinds of acts of love.

This is why all religions, all cultures, promote love. They are, in fact, social tools that push us to use our code in ways that create love. Giving and receiving it is the only way to consistently make yourself happy.

Sure, our code is not perfect. It went through a lot of iterations a few millions of years ago, when it developed some very inconvenient biases, some misplaced horniness, some nasty outbursts of anger, some dangerous and self-defeating doubts. What were survival features in the past are now, at best, inconvenient features that need sunsetting — at worst, destructive bugs that need to be squashed.

You may not be able to log in and rewrite your code completely. But what you can do is use the illusion of free will to steer yourself in the direction of love. The direction of happiness. Away from the immediate satisfaction of your self-destructive instincts, those outdated pieces of code.

What you do have is the ability to run your software for as long as possible, with as much love as possible, while making the most of the ride.

You don’t need more purpose than that.

Source: author

I lead Growth at Course Hero, an education technology company.If you are interested reading in more from me, follow me here on Medium.