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What do you think is the best thing about being human?
I feel that with the hustle of life, we never truly get to appreciate the opportunity that being a human presents. After all, being born at all is a one in a couple hundred million chance.
Probably the best thing is, unlike other animals, being deeply curious about what our world and the universe are, asking questions, exploring, and building vibrant, complex and fulfilling connections to other people. As far as we know for now, we are the masters of the universe, it's just still a long way to go.
By the way there's a pretty great music album which embraces this idea, Nightwish - Endless Forms Most Beautiful.
Yeah the comfort of modern living can be pretty impressive. We accept it for granted. Healthcare is lagging behind still, once most diseases are curable life will be even better.
The internet is the most incredible development of humanity I witnessed in my life. When I was a small kid I had only books (not a rich country and family), and holy shit I never was even thinking how far we would go in the near future.
We have language.
Seriously, what other creature in the known universe has a communication method so complex and versatile? Parrots don't. They can't form phrases, only imitate. Primates are close candidates but even they are often restricted to imitating a few things to transmit their general state of being. They don't discuss the meaning of life or write down shopping lists.
Language is the most elegant, most complex yet paradoxically also inefficient and fractured thing we have as humans. You can devote your entire life to it's study and never fully understand it. Language is both how we communicate and instruct each other but also how we give intangible shape to the warped, illogical mess of feelings and reason we all have in our heads.
It's amazing to me that we have something like that.
At the end of they day simply being aware of my own awareness, and having that awareness at all, is what really keeps me going. Through good days and bad days, I am constantly amazed that I am a thing at all. The world is fucking cool, and being self-aware is fucking cool.
I love this! I sometimes have these moments where it "occurs" to me that "I am", and how an extraordinarily wonderful thing that is.
This maybe isn't the best thing exactly, but I always love being human when it storms really hard. I love curling up under a blanket and listening to the wind and thunder and slowly falling asleep knowing that as a human in this time and place, I have a near invulnerable, dry, and perfectly climate-controlled shelter and storms have almost no consequences for me. It's a sort of mundane god-like experience.
What an uplifting question. Thanks for posting it!
Art, creativity, even having the luxury of getting depressed sometimes. But mostly, rational thought, along the same lines as @Nitta commented.
For example, I remember reading that humans are naturally a relatively inefficient species in regards to locomotion. But we built bicycles with our rational thinking and now we rule the world in that regard. Riding bikes is also really fun.
I like how this sounds. Bicycle being the most powerful tool to rule the world. But really, it's still one of the greatest inventions and also very environment friendly.
Kittens. Small kittens. And puppies. Small puppies. We get to keep them as little kids and I find that fantastic.
I get to experience art! I got to hear Ys, play Dark Souls, and watch Gurren Lagann. Being human sucks, but those things are what make it worth anything at all.
Something that I don't see mentioned that often is that humans have the ability to augment themselves. Obviously we've been doing this to our physical abilities for centuries, with guns, tools, etc. But the far more interesting side to this is mental augmentation. Computers have been providing a form of 'external memory' for decades, but I think we're on the cusp of true mental augmentation, maybe in 30-50 years we'll see the preliminary tech for this emerge. If you think about it, it's quite amazing, as humans are the only animal capable of improving themselves substantially outside of the slow process of evolution.
I can eat things others grew and (mostly) prepared. It's an incredibly wonderful thing that each and every one of us doesn't need to supply their own food directly from the wilderness.
I can also brag about this, which is something wonderful in it.
The Earth is seemingly the most extraordinary thing floating in the spaces, and we are the most extraordinary beings on that piece of wet rock. These things are so mundane that we can forget how wonderful they are. That in itself is a wonder.
The curiosity, compassion, and self-awareness that follows being human.
We are who we are, because, we are aware of who we are. We strive to make things better for ourselves, and the community around us, because we are aware of what we can do, and the harm at our fingertips available if we don't.
The consciousness and awareness of who and what we are, as individuals and as a collective. The fact that we, for the most part; have free will to work towards our ambitions and end goals.
I think this is a very important question and I'm amazed by the diverse experiences and insights posted here.
There was a time when I'd questioned my own humanity. Did I ever taken that Voigt--Kampff test? Then I realized that nothing I can do, nothing I can experience, is outside the human. That includes really a lot, mind-bogglingly lot. There are plunges of unfathomable depths and incredibly intricate labyrinths, pain and joy, all included in humanity.
The question is very challenging -- to name the best. I think this is actually a call for us to identify values, the nature of "good" itself. Even if I give "none" as an answer, doesn't this answer itself implies a certain value system, a choice?
I don't think there has to be the choice, not even the large class of choices. Perhaps there's nothing inherently, essentially "human". The features we owe to evolution is not necessarily "better" than those endowed to other species, other sentient beings. Just... different.
And if I were to arrange all things human in relation to each other, the resulting picture might well be centre-less, non-orientable, finite in infinitely nested details, looping over itself... The very mental means that enables us to identify "good" and "the best" are mobile parts in this picture, travelling and dissolving and emerging... And I can only see a small part of it. And there are so many of us...
And there are the voids, the emptiness, in the little crevices or yawning chasms everywhere, among the space between us one another. Perhaps to be human is to interact with the voids all the time.
But despite all these, or perhaps because of all these, there's a really good part in it. We can perceive others as they are. Not always, and always imperfectly, but nevertheless possible. To listen to sounds emerging from the other's depth of the soul, despite the differences, the complexity of experiences, the confines of individual minds. It's the closest to telepathy.