What we have here is a very highly-evolved species. We have created all these languages, technologies, social constructs... no mere ANIMAL ever did something on this order of intellectual ability. Our higher reasoning is so amazing that we have been able to explore things unimaginable distances beyond our own planet, through the incomprehensible vacuum of space... we have accomplished SO DAMN MANY things as a species.

You know what boggles the mind even further? If the entire existence of the earth were condensed into 24 hours, humans have existed for only the last 2 seconds of the day. Goodness me. In this super-short time that we've been here, we've created all this complex, intricate stuff with our awesome powers of higher reasoning.

One drawback of being so intellectually powerful is that we have literally stopped evolving. Think about it. We're kind of playing God here... we've beaten nature; we hacked natural selection! There is no natural selection anymore. We keep even the weakest members of our species alive with all the technology that we created. We have things like online dating, which matches you up with someone who, chances are, has a similar genetic profile to you - which, I would argue, is a sort of "devolution" whereby we breed a sub-group of genetically disadvantaged children born to parents who met online. We have antibiotics and miraculous medicine so that there IS NO MORE NATURAL SELECTION. We don't adapt to our environment - we adapt the environment to us!

Supposedly, we are the most intelligent species on earth. Dolphins are a close second. Dolphins are probably second place because they never evolved complicated shit like printing presses and etched silicon and scramjets. All they ever did was swim around in the ocean, eat food, and have sex to make more dolphins. We do have reason to believe that the dolphins have some sort of language. Ironically, because dolphins have evolved an exponentially better hearing range than humans, we can't communicate with them or figure out what they're saying. Ridiculous.

On the other hand, we're at a point in our highly-evolved society where you're born, acquire language, and then go to school. Once you've spent your youth going to boring classes and learning things that may or may not interest you, our highly-evolved society gives you an ultimatum: unskilled labor or higher education. If you choose unskilled labor, you spend your life in a series of jobs you don't particularly care about with little or no opportunity for advancement, somehow managing to keep up even though you are probably well below where the poverty line should be. If you choose higher education you piss away the youth you DO have left in even MORE classes so that you can get a degree, after which you'll work your ass off to pay for those classes for several more years.

Whatever the case may be, by the time you have the money or resources to do whatever it is you always wanted to do, you're too old to do it! Yeah, what an evolved society we live in - one where a lot of people are unhappy most of the time, or even all the time... one where you waste the best years of your life doing something that someone else is forcing you to do...

And you know what else? Unless you want to work for another man and let him exploit your labor, almost none of the stuff they teach you in school is REALLY useful... that is, commercially viable. Think about it... why would anyone want to give you money to rattle off a timeline of the Boer Wars? Maybe if you use some of their chemistry to cook up some drugs... but here's the thing, that's against the law, so you really shouldn't.

You know what? There are people out there who have Ph.D.s and are still just scraping by... getting paid $10/hour to do clerical work, for instance. I think it's time that we, as a species... as an ANIMAL (because that's all we really are)... stepped "outside the box" for a moment and took a look at ourselves. Yes, we're evolving and inventing all this great stuff, but... for what? At what cost? And we don't even think about it when we do things like... well, every couple hundred years up until the Columbian Exchange and colonization of the Americas during the 1500's, a pandemic would come along and wipe out a significant portion of our population. Since we have no natural predators, this was how nature kept our population under control. But we've made it so that people can live in even THE most crowded, close, could-theoretically-become-extremely-unsanitary conditions EVER and STILL not even get a runny nose... see Japan for more examples. This can't be good. We've breached some sort of failsafe that was built in to the logical laws that govern the growth and spread of organisms. Now we're paying for it with problems resulting from overpopulation. Shit, guys, the finite resources of the earth can't sustain such a rapidly-expanding population!

I digress. The point here is, since we're such a developed, amazing organism, why do we have to force people into lives they don't want? Why do we need to have such terrible things as investment bankers? No child ever said that he wanted to be an investment banker when he grew up! Instead, he "fell into it", or he realized that it offered many opportunities... always some money-related, societal thing.

People should not have to spend the best years of their life in college in order to sustain themselves! Why aren't the machines growing and harvesting all the food, crunching all the numbers, and watching all the life support system while we kick back and enjoy the fruits of our evolution?

Whatever; I don't even know where this is going.