Is Life Too Easy?

Something has been bothering me for the past several months, namely the thought that perhaps life is too easy these days. I don’t just mean that on a personal level, as in “my life has been too easy”, but also on a wider level. It begs the question: is Darwinism dead?

Humans exist for one purpose: to breed. As much as we might be interested in higher purposes, such as artistic or scientific pursuits, the fact remains that these are superfluous activities. Your only priorities as a human being can be broken down into three simple steps:

1. Stay alive.
2. Breed.
3. Repeat (if possible).

Sad, but true. As a kid, I was always under the misguided impression that grown-ups were subject to significant obstacles to achieve Step 1. You had to get a job. Getting a job was hard. You had to buy food and shelter. Food and shelter cost a lot. Et cetera. But now I find that none of those are anywhere near as hard as I once thought. Don’t get me wrong, it’s not like jobs fall into my lap or I’m a millionaire, but I’ve achieved success insofar as I’ve completed Step 1 for a sufficiently long enough period of time as to allow me to proceed onto Step 2 and consider my life’s work complete.

(Allow me to digress for a moment and state for the record this is not a subtle attempt to reveal my success in achieving Step 2. I have no intention of unleashing my demon spawn on the world until a much later date when the appropriate invasion plan has been formulated.)

So that’s it?!? I’m almost done?

Come to think of it, I’ve really been a bit of an overachiever. If I were really on top of my game, I would have moved onto Step 2 shortly after high school and taken the rest of eternity off for completing my assignment early. This is the path that many take and are they really any worse off? Sure, they may not live a luxurious lifestyle due to their lack of education or opportunity, but they’ve still succeeded in what counts from an evolutionary point of view. In today’s world, it’s pretty hard not to succeed on this evolutionary basis, at least at Steps 1 and 2.

The ease with which evolutionary success can be achieved makes me wonder if the fittest are really the ones that are surviving in today’s society. Is the human race dragging along genetic flotsam and jetsam that should have long ago been culled from the gene pool? But if it should have been culled, why wasn’t it? It almost seems as if the success of the human race to easily overcome evolutionary hurdles like predation and disease is enough to suggest that there is no higher purpose than Steps 1 and 2. Oh, and Step 3, time permitting.