I really relate to wanting to see greater meaning in reality. I grew up mormon, with this story that there is purpose to existence, that we as a church, as a people, were working towards something. As I learned more about history and scientific inquiry, that understanding of the world fell away. But... I still need to see purpose, still need my actions to be for something. Absurdism never really sat right with me. I'm sure there's genuine philosophical insight there, but... it's hard not to see it as a justification for whatever lifestyle you already happen to be living.

I've found a strange sort of... worldview? Spiritualism? something... in looking at the world in terms of evolution. We started with a universe of hot, simple gas and yet here we are billions of years latter as complex arrangements of matter perceiving the and understanding itself to be matter. I can't see that as a universe without purpose. When we talk about evolution in the english-speaking world, a lot of emphasis is placed on the competition, on the struggle for survival. "Nature is red in tooth and claw". It's certainly part of it. But in overemphasizing it, I think we overlook a much more core evolutionary principle: cooperation.

Each of us is a colossal, ambulatory city made of cells. Trillions and trillions of organisms sharing resources, dividing labor, cooperating. If we go down another level, each of those cells is itself already a symbiote - a big cell and a little cell (the mitochondria) working together to do more than either could on their own. Going up a level, we're talking to one another. Competition may iterate on an organism; make a tooth longer, a hide tougher. Cooperation does one better. It changes the paradigm.

We find ourselves in a universe that selects for cooperation. Maybe it's that way for a greater reason. But... even if it isn't, if it's just how these physical laws happen to be expressed... we still get to see what it may become. Contribute, even. I see a purpose in that.