Dear Alien Lifeforms,

    If you were to ask an existentialist, "what is the meaning of life?" they might say something like, "I'm not sure what the real meaning is, but there has to be one; why else would we be put here?".  If you were to ask me, or another pessimistic existentialist, I'd say, "There is none.  I don't know if our creation was a mistake that was too big to fix, or a joke that was too funny to stop, but there's no real meaning to our existence".  And that's the sad, sad truth.  At least in my perspective.  

    Humans make human lives out to be something amazing; and I suppose in a sad way they are.  We don't know who or what put us here, or why.  So we just keep doing the same thing over and over again, hoping we're doing it right.  Maybe at one point we were doing it right, but that would have been a long, long time ago.  Somewhere along the way, humans changed.  As our bodies evolved to survive, our minds devolved to be driven by power, money, and sex.  We don't need to survive anymore, so we fill the empty spaces with the need to thrive.  Our primal instincts are still in us, but we use them when unnecessary.  We start wars and in those wars are tiny little human lives that are fighting for God only knows what.  People, who have families and lives and personalities and pasts and a sweater they got as a birthday present, die.  And in the end of each of those wars, the only winners are the gun manufactures.  Outside of war, people are still dying.  They're getting hurt and killed and broken.  And while all that is going on, there's some capitalist rat making money off of someone else's work.  People are starving and crying, dying and raping, killing and buying.  We're just a big mess.

    The critical period hypothesis is a theory that if a child doesn't speak a language fluently by the time they are 9 (I believe that's the age, I could very well be wrong though), they never will.  We're like that in our nature.  We've never been peaceful, and I think we've been around too long for us to change that now.  We're children who never learned to talk.  In the beginning, we fought for survival; because we were primitive creatures, new to life.  But now we're supposedly "civil".  But we still fight, and I don't think anyone really knows what we're fighting about.  We're not civil, we're primitive creatures with advanced technology.

    But even a pessimist like myself has to admit, no matter how chaotic our world is, no matter how horrifying humans are, we create some beautiful things. Music, art, literature, films.  Every song, piece of art, and poem makes me hate humans a little less.  And finding delight through the dirt and grime is challenging, but it's worthwhile.  Stars, coffee, fireflies, sex.  We're such a disastrous creation.  Were we meant to be this way?  Or did we make ourselves this way?