What drives humans to seek connections and significance in the world around them? This quest for meaning derives from the uniquely human ability to plan for the distant future.
Humans are the meaning-seeking animals. We have an unquenchable desire to understand how the world is connected. All cultures have myths and stories about how the universe was created and who has power over natural phenomena. In our modern world, we also have scientific theories about the factors that govern different types of processes. All humans, at some point, ponder the meaning of life.
From a cognitive point of view, an important question then becomes why we humans cannot help but strive for meaning in virtually everything we do. To answer this, one must understand why the human brain is built to search for connections everywhere, even in the most random events. Reducing one of humanity's most profound qualities to counting the prizes in the evolutionary lottery may seem dry. Questions of meaning seem to be outside the domain of biology.
Our unique position as meaning-seeking creatures derives from the fact that we are the only animal that can plan for the distant future and not just for our present needs. For this, we need some long-term goal to motivate us to think about future consequences and not just live for the moment. As a species, we have now reached the point where our existence is fundamentally determined by these ideas—we are obsessed with thoughts of the future..
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