As far as we know right now, life first began on earth about 3.45 billion years ago. Those first lives were prokaryotes, or simple, single-celled organisms with no nucleus or organelles. They had no drive for food because they just passively absorbed nutrients through theri cell membranes from the ambient environment, which bore those nutrients to them on water currrents. They didn't have a sex drive because they didn't have sexual differentiation. They didn't seek shelter because shelter was not needed. So what most people consider the basic human drives, food, sex and shelter, were absent from the first life on earth. But it's even more extreme than that. They didn't even have genes! Without a nucleus they had no DNA and they also didn't have RNA. We don't know whether they divided or reproduced by any means at all.
Yet we do know something that even makes it possible for us to discover traces of these first lives: they formed colonies. Whether they had any kind of instinct to form colonies or not is open to debate, but form colonies they did. Which is something they appear to have inherited from inanimate objects, because there are countless natural examples of non-organic accumulation, including the accumulation of silt on the beds of bodies of water and the very coalescing of interstellar gas into stars and planets.
So it turns out that belonging to groups is the oldest property of life, and is probably older than life itself. Which suggests that what we experience when our push to belong to groups is frustrated, namely loneliness, is about as fundamental an experience as is possible for us as living things.
But I see such precursor properties to be atavizing. Like all such things, loneliness takes us back to a time before even genes existed, and puts us in a pre-gene mindset. That is not a mindset I consider appropriate for myself as a member of homo sapiens sapiens. So I see any feeling of loneliness I ever have, and any need to be around other people, as something to be conquered in my pursuit of becoming purely human. And I keep posting here only because I haven't conquered it yet.
Yet we do know something that even makes it possible for us to discover traces of these first lives: they formed colonies. Whether they had any kind of instinct to form colonies or not is open to debate, but form colonies they did. Which is something they appear to have inherited from inanimate objects, because there are countless natural examples of non-organic accumulation, including the accumulation of silt on the beds of bodies of water and the very coalescing of interstellar gas into stars and planets.
So it turns out that belonging to groups is the oldest property of life, and is probably older than life itself. Which suggests that what we experience when our push to belong to groups is frustrated, namely loneliness, is about as fundamental an experience as is possible for us as living things.
But I see such precursor properties to be atavizing. Like all such things, loneliness takes us back to a time before even genes existed, and puts us in a pre-gene mindset. That is not a mindset I consider appropriate for myself as a member of homo sapiens sapiens. So I see any feeling of loneliness I ever have, and any need to be around other people, as something to be conquered in my pursuit of becoming purely human. And I keep posting here only because I haven't conquered it yet.
