“What is it to be human?

What is the nature of the universe?

What is our place in the universe?

Why do we even exist?”

These are questions we have asked ourselves for millennia. The human regarding itself is a longstanding tradition that will not go away – even as we find trinkets to entertain ourselves and to temporarily forget the emptiness that is modern life.

In a time where the commodification of life is a constant, we seem to “die in our spare time and come back on company expenses.” Many feel powerless and feel like they live on borrowed kindness to survive. Nowadays, we ask ourselves: “what constitutes real life and real death in a world where everything is monetized? Even our time to breath, to dream, and to die?” Is our current socio-economic system and our way of thinking about modernity (which we hold on so fastidiously), not a form of living death for some?

Perhaps an outsiders view of humanity can wrangle us away from our impotence and show us the inertia and hurdles we have designed for ourselves? What would an alien say about humanity? Would they be disappointed? Happy? Despite our entireties for them to examine the fruits of our social progress, we have little good to show. How can we be better? Is there something which is stopping us?

Here are a selection of truths and conversations which I have found, compiled and illustrated to explore the above points.