As someone fascinated by interesting facts, the most interesting thing to me is how it seems like the human experience largely consists on trying to figure out "what the point of it all is" in the first place and then arguing about it. Whether we look at cultures no longer thriving like they once were (like the ancient Egyptian, Greek or Roman) or the ones we have alive and well now, there is always a common theme: to make sense and order out of the complete chaos that is living a human life. So, in this, I suppose the most interesting thing to me is that no matter how people as a species evolve and change, we're still just trying to figure out what happens after this and make peace with our time here too.
When studying mythology in any cultures really, we see stories giving credits to Gods to explain naturally occurring events because they had no other way of knowing at the time. Things like volcanic eruptions, immense floods and long lasting droughts were seen as the Gods' ways of displaying their anger with your city that could be remedied through prayer or rituals, rather than natural functions of the giant floating rock we live on. Based on their understanding of how their world worked, these stories lead to a communal way of life with the intention of earning your way to a place that will make the suffering and confusing things humans experience in the mortal world, worth it. These days, we attribute these exact same things on global warming because we've since developed scientific ways of understanding without religion being involved at all. Another interesting comparison on both is how humans believe everything that happens is also because of humans. In the earlier religious-focused eras, the Gods reacted to human behaviors and decisions. Now, global warming is contributed again to human behaviors and decisions.
So what's the point of it all? Older cultures like Ancient Greece had philosophers like Democritis (who was the first recorded as saying such) but also Socrates, who made the argument of hedonism, which is the belief that the point of life is to experience and enjoy as much of it as you could. They discussed these ideals enough to carry forward into several literal schools of thought resulting in the later cultures as well. So in these beliefs, the most important thing is still the human experience, based around their behaviors and decisions.
How can something as awesome as hedonism go wrong, you might ask. Well, humans are not a flawless creature and again, each religion has this innate need to be right and all supreme. It's crazy to think that Christianity or Catholicism might not have achieved such power if it weren't for the reach Rome had before being conquered. Once one man, the roman emperor Constantinus, motivated by a whole slew of other men made the decision to convert, it was made entirely too easy to spread their culture and eliminate others with competing religions and ideologies. At this point, humans feel empowered by their myriad of higher powers to enact their personal will on others that do not have those same behaviors or make the same decision as they would.
So I suppose, yet another interesting thing about humans is that we can all, at least on some level, agree the point of human life is to experience as much of it as we can, while still striving to be a good human so that we can earn our way to an even better paradise someday. It's beautiful to acknowledge and genuinely conceptualize at it's bare roots, but through human suffering, has somehow made the human suffering worse. Instead of appreciating that we're all addressing the same higher being(s) with our own perspectives, humans also want to feel correct in their behaviors and decisions.
Source:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hedonism
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