What the Hell Are We Doing?

This morning, as I sat at my desk—shoulders hunched, fingers tapping out some perfunctory string of tasks—I felt a sudden, surging wave of something I couldn’t quite name but recognized deeply. A silent flood of energy and emotion. Not visible from the outside, but utterly palpable in my chest and mind. A pressure. A pulsing beat. A quiet scream. While my body moved forward on autopilot, something deeper cracked open, leaked out, and simmered. The question that rose to the surface was sharp and insistent: What is the purpose of any of this—our existence—if all we’re doing is killing ourselves and destroying the only home we’ll ever have—Earth?

I know—it sounds naive. Simplistic, even adolescent in its idealism. I know some will read this and immediately leap to defend the grind: to invoke the realities of obtaining food, water, shelter, and safety. I’m not denying any those needs. Again, I’m simply asking—what are we sacrificing to meet them in a system we’ve come to accept as normal, inevitable, immutable? Who, truly, is benefiting from all of this?

Every day, we wake up exhausted from sleep that never feels like enough rest. We rush into routines—commuting, clocking in, logging on—working jobs we tolerate at best, despise at worst. All in the name of survival. Most of us are not chasing passion or purpose. We are trapped in a ritual of necessity, dictated by systems indifferent to our well-being. We earn just enough to limp through the month, praying we stay healthy enough to avoid care we can’t afford, clinging to scraps of time with the people we love in homes built for profit, not for life. All of this—for what?

I dream, often, of exploring rainforests—lush, humming with life, filled with the iridescent flicker of butterflies, tree frogs clinging to leaves, insects of impossible shape and color, birds singing in a language older than humanity. I dream of standing before an orangutan in Borneo, of swimming among coral reefs before they bleach out and die. I dream of giraffes grazing beside herds of wildebeest, lions basking in the heat, and elephants—those massive ancient titans—trudging across the beautiful Serengeti. But most of all, I dream of my son—and all humanity’s children, of today and all those still to come—breathing clean air, drinking pure water, and seeing the world’s beauty with their own eyes, not just on screens or in books.

I know these dreams may remain only that—dreams. Not because they are impractical or impossible, but because we’ve built a world that demands we forsake them. A world that says these dreams must be sacrificed at the altar of profit, because that’s just how it is. To question that world and those systems is sacrilege.

For the overwhelming majority of humanity, life has become nothing more but a daily performance of self-erasure. We hustle, we grind, we contort ourselves for entities that would cast us out into the streets without a second thought the moment we fail to produce. We’re told to be grateful for it. We toil not for joy, not for our communities, not even for collective human progress—but simply to afford poisoned food, contaminated water, and homes built from materials so cheap they crumble even as they cost us everything.

We wear ourselves out—physically, mentally, emotionally—just to access the barest scraps of human dignity. A doctor’s visit. A treatment. A moment of relief. Meanwhile, those in power hoard, extract, consume—shamelessly, endlessly. They feed off our labor and the dying breath of our planet, offering us nothing more than empty slogans, indifferent smirks, and silence.

We do this for decades. Year after year. We enter the machine young—hopeful, whole, unbroken—and it almost always grinds us down into cynicism, regret, and chronic pain. By the time we reach the so-called ‘freedom’ of retirement, too many of us find our bodies are too frail or too damaged to pursue the dreams we once shelved. We give the best of ourselves—our youth, our creativity, our spirit, our joy—to a world that sees us as nothing more than data points and disposable tools.

While all of this happens, we fight amongst ourselves—over scraps of identity and narrative. Over who’s allowed to love whom. Over which God is the right one. Over whether a child can choose their name or identity. Over whether a woman should be forced to carry a rapist’s child or not. Over guns, flags, imaginary borders, and manufactured outrage—while the Earth literally dies beneath our feet. While the richest among us escape to their fourth homes and private yachts, built on the backs of our collective misery and exhaustion, without a single care for the rest of us.

Still, many of us try. We try to live better. We buy the eco-friendly detergent, the clothes made from recycled materials. We sort, we compost, we reuse. But the truth is—we can’t recycle our way out of this. Industries spew more poison and destruction in a day than we could ever collectively offset in a lifetime. Industrial and technological cult leaders fly their children to the last wild places on Earth so they can see and remember them, while the rest of us are told to be satisfied with the yearning of those experiences—those dreams. Because they too know what we all know: all of this is unsustainable. The bill is already coming due.

What is the point of all this pain, suffering, and destruction if we are nothing more than the biological equivalent of disposable gears in a machine that feeds on human sorrow?

We give our youth, our hope, our time, our bodies—to something that gives us less and less with each passing year. When we finally ask what it’s all for, we’re told to shut up, sit down, and be grateful we have anything at all.

This isn’t living. It’s a long, slow burial beneath the weight of bullshit obligations we never chose. Ones we never have a real say in. It’s dreaming of life while being told we exist only to sustain someone else’s.

We—as a species—need to stop. Not stop reality. Not stop existing. But stop this self-destructive and unsustainable way of being. This pathology of extraction. This sickness sold to us as normal. We must turn inward in thought and pause. We must take the time to remember who we were before we were broken into obedience.

We must remember the child in us who loved bugs and stars, or dolls and makeup. Who wanted to climb trees, save animals, or build something that mattered. Who dreamed of being an astronaut, or a doctor, or simply someone who helped others. Remember the awe, the wonder, the playfulness. That was never naive. That was truth. That was you, me—all of us—unbroken. That is the best of us. The best of our humanity.

There is still something left to fight for: this planet and its biodiversity, this fragile, gorgeous miracle of life we’re all lucky to witness and be a part of. And, each other. Every inch of time and life and natural beauty we can claw back from the clenched mouth of a system that measures everything, including life itself, in terms of profit and throws it away when it no longer serves.

We are not meant to be numbers. We are not meant to be fuel. We are not meant to be machines. We are meant to live. We are meant to explore, discover, and create. It’s about damn time we as a species remembered what that means. For if not—then what, truly, is the purpose of any of it?