Consume
Get everything you can as fast as you can.
Expel
Get rid of you need to.
Sleep
You’ll need your rest to carry on the fight.
Mate
Pass on those genes or you loose.
So is that all there is?
What’s the meaning of evolution? Not the word—meaning. Is life just “eat, sleep, mate, repeat,” or is there a reason we ache for more? If atheism and unguided evolution are the whole story, why are we wired to need meaning like oxygen?
The stock reply is that natural selection doesn’t care about truth; it cares about fitness. If a comforting story helps genes move forward, great. On that view, “meaning” is a useful hallucination—interface graphics over a raw, indifferent desktop.
But look at how our minds and societies behave when meaning collapses. People don’t become sleek survival machines; they crater. Depression doesn’t just make you sad; it shreds the very map that tells action what matters. Anhedonia cancels value. Helplessness cancels agency. Attention locks onto threat and futility. If nihilism were both accurate and adaptive, our nervous system should reward it. Instead, it punishes meaning-loss with pain and dysfunction—as if meaning were a real need, not an ornamental myth.
Scale up and you see the same pattern. Civilizations don’t die because they ran out of calories first; they die because they ran out of why. They trade thick purposes—justice, duty, stewardship—for thin ones—status, spectacle, appetite. Meaning without error-correction (no dissent, no humility, no feedback) becomes a wrecking ball. And meaning reduced to “whatever feels good now” hollows people out long before any predator shows up.
We even see glimmers of this beyond humans. Animals sometimes act against narrow self-interest—guarding unrelated young, sharing food, pausing to investigate the distressed. Call it instinct if you like; the point remains: the world is not a simple scoreboard of calories and copulation. There are patterns of value that organisms track—even when it costs them.
So ask the real question: Why are we built to suffer when meaning fails? If meaning is just a sugar-pill, evolution spent an awful lot of circuitry making its absence feel like a broken bone. A cleaner story is that meaning is a mode of contact—imperfect but real—with goods and ends outside our heads. We need it because reality actually contains things worth doing and lives worth living, and because persons are more than gene-movers.
You don’t have to leap from that to a full catechism. But once you admit that meaning is not merely a fitness hack—that it binds, obligates, and sometimes rightly beats survival—then a purely unguided picture grows thin. The simplest ground for objective goods, duties, and purposes is not a blind process; it’s Mind—an ultimate Good that makes lesser goods intelligible.
If there is no God, then there is no fact of the matter about meaning. But we live and hurt as if there is. We’re pulled by it, shaped by it, saved by it. The lie isn’t that humans chase meaning; the lie is that meaning is a lie. A life spent insisting otherwise isn’t brave realism—it’s malnutrition of the soul.
