a thought

If there were no God, if men were merely a race of naked apes, a product of hundreds of millions of years of random selection of the fittest traits by random factors in the environment, if life were just a slight anomaly on a tiny speck of a planet in the expanse of an enormous Universe,

Why should I live? Why should I do anything? Is there any purpose which the inevitable death that awaits me does not undo or destroy?

It's funny how my psychology book quotes Leo Tolstoy, and leaves his (and our) deepest questions of existence unanswered, but still assures its reader that he would still find psychology "fascinating and useful." The same gnawing question goes for all other fields of human knowledge. Why bother study organic reactions and the molecular dynamics of the cell, or Peter Paul Rubens' paintings or the Mahabharata, or the law of marginal utility, or computers?

This is as blunt as it gets: if all these "if's" were true, life would be nothing but an absurd heart-breaking tragedy.

But are they? ☺