Our humanity consists in the fact that we do more than survive, that a great part of what we do confers no survival benefit in terms presumably salient from the Pleistocene point of view.

Marilynne Robinson
About This Quote

It is often assumed that the only thing people can do to be human is to take care of themselves. We are taught that our only purpose in life is to take care of ourselves. When we live longer, have more comfortable lives, and have more time to accomplish things, what are we to do with all of this? It is so easy to believe that our purpose is only about surviving our days. People forget how much work it took to survive to begin with.

We forget how humans lived so much harder lives in the past. If we are no longer working as hard as they did just for survival purposes, then why are we still working so hard?

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