Fiction is about what it’s like to be a fucking human being, said David Foster Wallace. The poor bastard was cursed with an intellect with more firepower than he could handle. You’d have to feel the flames to know of a terror worse than death he said, before he crushed his windpipe with a rope.

I don’t know if I can write fiction but I think I have a vague sense of what it’s like to be a fucking human being. (Source: I am human, as far as anybody can tell.)

The first thing you need to know about being human is that we are all animals. I don’t mean that in a necessarily negative sense, and I don’t know if I mean that in the “red in tooth and claw” sense. All I mean is that we’re all little bags of chemicals running around a larger blob of chemicals that’s orbiting a nuclear reactor (called the sun) at about 100,000 km/h.

At the time of this writing (shaky hand, ballpoint pen, foolscap paper, Tampines Bus Interchange, Singapore, 2013 AD, 10pm) there is no way of escaping this reality. Perhaps there will be, some day, but not in the foreseeable future.

We are made up of atoms that were birthed in the explosions of unstable stars that then scattered their enriched guts across the universe. (Neil Tyson’s words, not mine.) These atoms obey rules to a high degree. I’m not saying that your life is predetermined or anything so dramatic; that would be pretense of knowledge. All I can say is that you’re a fucking bag of chemicals (Carbon, Nitrogen, Oxygen). If you were doused in kerosene and set alight, you would combust and decompose into your constituent molecules.

Of course, we’re also more than our atoms. Atoms don’t sing and dance and cry and write and read articles on the internet. People do. The atoms play a role in those processes, but there are important emergent properties that cannot be explained at the atomic level alone.

I could have decomposed by the time you read this, maybe 500 years later- yet there is something remarkable happening, isn’t there You hear my “voice”. You interpret my thoughts. Long after the bag of chemicals that put these symbols together ceases to exist, these symbols (on paper, or pixels, or perhaps some more advanced means of transmitting information), can be meaningfully interpreted by other bags of chemicals. That’s pretty magical. Some things may be lost in translation, since languages evolve over time, but you should be able to empathize to some degree, just as we are able to empathize with Shakespeare hundreds of years after he passed away. A story (a pattern) from 2000 BC can still evoke emotional responses in the brains of humans reading or hearing it 4,000 years later, bridging us across space and time.

More than atoms we are patterns, part of a vast cosmic dance that endures, persisting despite the death of individual dancers.

That wondrous, magical reality aside, we’re still animals. A sexually attractive member of our species can still command our rapt attention. We enjoy praise and flattery- we are social creatures after all, evolved within social circumstances, an we respond to social cues. We are victims to all sorts of illusions, even when we’re entirely aware of the existence of such illusions. We can study science and explain the behaviour of celestial bodies, yet we’re unable to escape the recursive loop of social dynamics (even though we have a pretty decent understanding of those, too.) We are animals. I say this with honesty and respect for your intellect, and I want you to like me, and I want you to be true, and we are still animals.

Did you know that sea otters hold hands when sleeping so that they don’t drift apart? So cute. They also rape baby seals to death. Isn’t that adorable? Temple Grandin described how animals kill each other far more brutally than humans kill animals. (Humans are more, uh, humane. Sometimes.) It’s the captivity part of animal-rearing that’s messed up. That said, if animals could farm their prey, wouldn’t they? (How human of me to assert that.)

The point is that animals aren’t any better or worse than us, not really. We don’t really have any meaningful way of comparing. “The more I know of men, the more I love dogs,” someone famously said. But you can’t divorce dogs from humans! Dogs are domesticated wolves, bred to be subservient, dependent and loyal to their pack leaders- humans. They’ve essentially been brainwashed as a species to be sweet and loving to us! Sure we love them more than we love each other- because they’re harmless, they don’t demand independence, they don’t seek dominion over us because we’ve won. I’m not saying that it’s good or bad to domesticate animals- it is what it is. Just that a lot of our rhetoric about humans and animals seems frightfully naive and oversimplistic, and that doesn’t help us understand ourselves and our place in this vast uncaring universe (or at least, our place among one another) any better.

Dogs are animals and humans are animals and we all seek chemical rewards in the brain. Rats that have been given an opportunity to press a switch that triggers such a chemical reward have been shown to press that switch until they die of starvation. This is pretty similar to drug addiction and all other forms of human obsession and addiction. We’re animals chasing chemical hits, that is what we are, and being dishonest about it is not very helpful. (We don’t talk much about pleasure and pain in schools, do we? It’s so damn important, yet we don’t talk about it, we build entire industries dedicated to it but we hardly talk about it… that’s part of what it is to be a fucking human being, to have to reconcile that bullshit.)

Different people have different brain chemistry, and it’s ridiculous and absurd how drastically different people’s brains can be. If you’re reading this in the future, you might be smiling and shaking your head at my primitive understanding of the human brain. I am writing this partially in pursuit of a chemical high myself, and to claim otherwise would be intellectually dishonest. There is something in my brain that gets activated when I do this, and that is part of why I do this, and it frustrates me that we don’t talk about this more openly.

(To be continued)