There's something wonderful about things that have no purpose. There's something even more wonderful about the capacity to see value in things that have no apparent purpose on this Earth. When contemplated sufficiently, stupid and meaningless things unfold into an array of differing thoughts leading to very important questions.
If you are a squirrel trying to get through your day, you are often thinking, "I have to find more nuts!" and occasionally, "Should I run across the road? Yes! No!" In the midst of a squirrel's hectic and indecisive life it will never occur to the squirrel that it could arrange the nuts in an interesting pattern. A human can, however. A squirrel will never look up at the stars and contemplate the million-year-old photons hitting its retinas which were created in the explosive fusion core of a star trillions of miles away. Most humans don't either, but they can.
The very fact that you can do things in this world that have absolutely no connection to critical life-sustaining goals such as nourishment and procreation is one of the most essential capacities of being human. You have the capacity for wonder. How often do you engage it?
Evolution has brought us to the point where we can contemplate the thousands of lives that led up to ours. You literally sit on top of the toil, suffering, failures and successes of ten thousand generations. And now it is your turn. Your incredibly, staggeringly unlikely life is both a priviledge and responsibility. As a human being who lives in the most chaotic, the most individually empowered, the most dangerous, the most hopeful and the most critical moment of all human history, you have the responsibility to all other living creatures, as well as those that come before you and after you, to ask really big questions, to think about the unknowable and to be more than a consuming, procreating organism.
But, this sort of thinking comes at a cost. The more you think like this, the more the daily things we are supposed to take care of in this life become even more prosaic and mundane. You will no longer be excited about things like buying couches, scrolling endlessly on TicTok, or writing HTML. The trick is not to engage that profound sense of wonder from standing on mountain tops, but rather, from noticing how the grime accumulates on your keyboard, how your drink feels as you swallow, and how lucky we are to share these experiences with each other for this short time.