Mutually agreed nonsense and other ways to create meaning in a totally absurd universe

Photo by Mohan Reddy, Pexels

Whilst reading Yuval Noah Harari’s book Sapiens, it occurred to me the extent to which humans have just created rules for ourselves. An ‘imagined order’ as Harari describes it in his book. Whilst the way I use the term here is perhaps slightly looser than in Harari’s book, it follows the same idea: the lives of humans come partly down to our genes and a lot to what’s in our heads.

The humans of 12,000 years ago weren’t dissimilar from the ones today. Biological changes have been relatively minor (because if humans had significantly evolved then we wouldn’t still be ‘humans’) and our brains have more or less stayed the same since the creation of spoken language. However, humans pre-10,000 BC lived very different lives.

Humans used to be hunter gatherers, which means we did a fair amount of hunting and, surprisingly, a decent amount of gathering too. The life of a human was like that of other animal species. We’d find food to eat, survive long enough to reproduce — hence fulfilling a fundamental tenet of evolution — then probably look after some children, hunt and gather some more then die.

In terms of biology — where the main aim is to pass on one’s genes to the next generation — this could be deemed a relatively satisfactory life. At a fundamental…