Meaning Is Just a Story We All Agreed On

We — as a species have a tendency to cooperate among a group with up to 150 people. If we go over that, conflicts begin to rise leading to splitting off of groups. I want you to just think about that for a second, If such is true then how come there are thousands of people gathering to fight for a country, for a religion, for a cause?

It’s weird, but simple: fiction. Early humans such as neanderthals, homo habilis, homo erectus and such did not posses the ability to communicate abstract ideas - they could describe “look a lion is over there, we should run from here” but they couldn’t describe high level ideas such as “I will give you this piece of paper with a picture of an important person and in exchange you will give me apples”. Sarcastic - but you get the idea. Point is, sapiens can communicate abstract ideas, they can explain things that don’t exist, or could exist or should exist. We can communicate fiction. And since we can communicate fiction, we can control the masses by having them believe in something - money for example. Money is just paper, it has no real value. It only has value because our species decided it has value. We communicated this ‘fiction’ and thus 7 billion people around the world believe in it and they’re convinced that in order to eat, they must earn a piece of paper, for which they must spend 16 years of their lives learning a skill and using that skill to get that paper to get the apples.

It sounds really stupid to think about. But the reason we’ve survived so much and why we’re the last humans left while all other human species gradually deceased is because of our ability to communicate - because of our ability to move our mouths in certain ways to articulate an idea. Doing so, we have achieved cooperation of unimaginable scales. You can distribute the fiction of a nation to a group of people and you’ll have thousands of individuals who bought in to your fiction to lay down their lives. To fight for ‘glory’, for ‘valor’, for ‘the country’. Because, a country isn’t a physical thing. The earth does not know we’re calling a piece of land for each group of sapiens and coming up with imaginary lines to determine who owns what. Was there a really good reason to build giant pyramids? investing a substantial amount of money, unspeakable amount of hardwork and effort just to build a tomb for a fellow sapien?

Sure, they were making it for the king but what really is a king? Isn’t that a fiction the people accepted way back then? Didn’t they consciously or subconsciously accept that the king deserves more respect and must be buried in a well-built place? So pyramids were built for an accepted fiction - was it not?

I don’t necessarily mean to say it’s bad - it’s not at all bad. This helps sapiens to cooperate, introduces law and order, helps endeavor for what was in the past impossible to even think of such as space travel or a gpt-5 and it forces us to figure out more about everything - and hopefully more about consciousness which is one thing I’m oddly very curious about. I believe that with the advancements and relatively easier lives we live where we’re not constantly worried about being crucified, we have too much leisure time to think. Thinking inevitably leads us to think why we’re doing anything at all and if you don’t have an answer to that, you’re pretty much not going to be excited about life. You’ll be a hollow shell of a person and want to do pretty much nothing. That’s called hopelessness and hopelessness often stems from a lack of meaning. Thus, in order to survive, we need to get up everyday and do something. In order to get up and do something, we need hope. In order to have hope, we need a robust sense of meaning. Most of the “meaning” that an individual tends to generate or adapt for themself is indeed fiction. “I want to be rich” - well money is just a piece of paper that the world collectively believes in. You’re not aiming for something real, you’re aiming for a man-made fiction. Sure, you can use that fictional artifact to buy physical things however it doesn’t change the underlying nature of the idea. As a by-product of consciousness, we crave for meaning and to satiate it, we create meaning - by using any means possible and we must if we have to survive. So, fiction has kept sapiens alive and it’s really, really weird to think about