What does it mean to be human?

It really does take some thinking to answer this question. Well, not some thinking, a lot of thinking. Knowing the answer to this question would just make us all the same. Human is just a word we use to identify ourselves. We believe that we are superior to animals, but I wonder, how are we any better than animals? What have we done to say that we are great? We live in this tiny world, unaware of anything going on in other “worlds.” Forget about other worlds, we don’t even know what’s going on in our world. Being human today just means trying to be the best, always competing and hating when we lose. The truth, however, is that we’re not the best. We’re nothing. The earth is not the only planet, and the Milky Way is not the only galaxy. There are billions of galaxies. Who knows what “creatures” are out there? There can be another world, and the creatures living on that world may act the same as we do. They might not know about us. So how can we say that we are the best living things?

What are we doing in our lives that make us so outstanding? Do we know? Isn’t that the whole point, to try and discover why we were brought onto this world? Many of us haven’t stopped to think what we are doing here. Our life is just to go to school, get pressurized to work harder to get into college, get a job, get married, work for our families, and die. During this process we are too occupied with all the work we have we get frustrated, and sometimes tell ourselves we would rather die than stay alive. But really, who told you to work so hard? Who told you that you have to become a millionaire? Did society? Well if that’s the case, then I would not know what to say, because it’s your own choice to listen to those idiots or not to. Anyways, as I was saying, we get so busy with our lives we don’t get a chance to actually do what we want to, or do something extraordinary, yet we are living with the idea that humans are exceptional. There are only those rare people who set out to do something different in life, those couple of people who are so determined to accomplish their goal. Why can’t we all be like them? We could do wonders if we did.

I don’t believe that we can compare ourselves to animals, because even though we are so much more complex than animals, we don’t use this brain we have. What are we creating? I know, global warming. That’s why humans are so useful, we actually do something, but that something is just ruining our world. Ruining the place we were given to live. What are we going to do when we completely destroy the earth? We might just blame animals, because they’re stupid. They can’t talk, so whatever, we’ll just blame them, like we blame everything we do on others. You see we actually try to do something good, but when everything gets messed up we blame another person and don’t try to fix anything. What really irritates me is that every human being is fake. If we don’t appreciate a person, we shouldn’t make them feel that we like them. Just don’t talk to them. A lot of times we just use people for our benefits, and when we don’t need them anymore, we let them go, not realizing that they are still attached to us. Being human today means doing everything for ourselves. It means running a race all your life trying to get ahead, not bothering to look behind if anyone has fallen. Even if we do turn our head (probably to see whether someone is catching up or not), we continue to run, because all we want is to help ourselves, not others.

Being human, is a great thing, because we were given the opportunity do things which animals can’t. That’s the power we have. The power to help and empathize. To see others in a good way, and hope everyone is successful. Our problem is that we look at success with too much greed, which is why we can’t get it. Being human is just allowing success to come to you, not following it. Human life is precious, because there are so many wonderful things we can do, so much knowledge we can receive. We are able to express our ideas, and share our knowledge. If we only learn to take some time out of our busy lives to find our purpose on the earth, we would maybe not be so selfish, or greedy. Maybe we would learn to slow down in life, and actually experience it, rather than speed up and not pay attention to anything. It’s hard to answer what it means to be human, and sometimes we come up with different questions to answer this question. Who knows, we might just discover the answer to this question one day.

Sandhya Parwani 10C