I must tell you that humans are a complete and utter astonishment to me. From my short years of experience, I feel that there are so many paradoxes about the way that they live that it is surprising and almost impossible that they have managed to survive this long. True, a few million years is nothing on the scale of true life, but they seem to take pride in it all the same. Perhaps they have reason.
Look at all of them. Watch what they are doing right now. Don't look at the things that they often seem to thing of as important, but regard instead the underlying fabric of which they are made.
Here they are, small life forms on the surface of this watery blue-green planet, this pinpoint in the cosmos. They come into being here, they eat, perhaps they pass on their "DNA, and then they die. That's all that it begins as. Sometimes even they acknowledge their mortality, saying "None of us gets out of here alive." Yet everything seems to have pushed between the seams of that, and threaded itself into part of their grand design. Cars, money, social status, jealousy, love, material wealth, technology, philosophy, science, hatred, greed, and all of the other non-essentials that they keep in their lives. Here is the interesting thing. I believe that all of these things are just solutions woven to fit one problem. The problem? Boredom.
Watch them. What else can you call it? The only true way to describe it is with a word that they made up themselves. All of their life, they are expecting something, and they just decided to climb a mountain while they waited. And millennia have passed in the meantime. The overwhelming purpose of their life has become to just hang on. Sometimes not even to enjoy it, buy only to grip ever tighter the ledge that hangs over the chasm created from their own minds. There are microorganisms which exist for only about half an hour or less as individuals before dying, but whose descendants will probably be around after humans die out. Yet still the humans grasp their sand grains of ideas, searching for immortality among them. The only way to attain even temporary immortality is to be the rock.
Perhaps they have just forgotten what they were stopping here for. I'm confident that their existence will get itself remembered sooner or later. Something will jog their memory... maybe the end of the universe. Possibly the metamorphosis of a small South American termite. Who knows? I expect to see an awakening when it happens. Everyone will stop their less important things, and settle down to true existence, pure existence, they would say 'nothing'. I'll be waiting for them when they do.
Now we come to the problem and the solution.
Here they rest, like "a senior citizen with Alzheimer's". They invent these things to pass the time. These activities become more and more complex, often losing the original meaning. They continue on their paths, not knowing the way. They walk over a bridge, and only in retrospect realize that the flood has washed it away. In their ramblings over the past, they discover something new that they have made possible. Absurdity.
This new facet, this strange anomaly, outdoes itself and its creators. It becomes their best chance of survival, and perhaps their ultimate doom. For that reason, at least, it is like a stick in the gears of the universe. It can bring the sense of the natural order in things to a grinding halt. It can also start it up again. Humans must develop a well-manufactured understanding of their creation for protection, for it can shield them from themselves, and it can fend off others.
This explains, therefore, the connection between their happiness and their understanding of the unexplainable.
It can be seen in at least one action that they undertake. Laughter.
This is perhaps their one characteristic that makes them stand out above everything that cannot do the same.
All of this culminates into one paradox- Did you laugh?