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Get ready for the heavy stuff. It will be uncomfortable to some, but I think you guys are ready for it.

Aristotle believed that a thing could be called “good” insofar as it successfully performed its intended function. Tables are designed to be flat surfaces for supporting objects above the ground. Boats are designed to transport people and objects across water. Selfie sticks are designed to publicly embarrass their owners.

The function of a human being, Aristotle believed, is happiness. It seems intuitive enough that the state toward which we all seem to be striving, however elusive it may be, would be our function. Many people today share this view.

Aristotle has much wisdom to offer, but he failed to make a realization that the modern world has only recently uncovered. A reality which seems to defy intuition, comprehension, and acceptance today, and which few have the courage to face.

We were not made to be happy. The function of the human being is not to achieve deep satisfaction, nor is it to be productive, altruistic, or rational. We were, in fact, not made for us at all. Our function is to serve another entity altogether – our genes. Using Aristotle’s lens, a good human would not be one that is happy, wise, or moral, but one which makes babies like it’s 1957.

There’s a scene from the infamous Adult Swim show, Rick and Morty, in which Rick quickly builds a robot to pass a dish of butter across the table. After completing its task, the robot asks “What is my purpose?” Rick replies “You pass butter.” The robot looks down in despair and says “Oh my God.” Rick then responds “Yeah, welcome to the club, pal.”

Most find this to be a comically absurd interaction. But if you simply replace Rick with evolution, the butter with our genes, and the table with generations, you end up with an incredibly accurate depiction of the human condition.

Most people assume our genes exist to make copies of us. The reality is far less intuitive: We exist to make copies of our genes. Everything about the human condition was sculpted over millions of years to make us the best little gene propagation robots possible.

In The Selfish Gene (quite possibly the most important intellectual work of the last century), Dawkins says “We are survival machines – robot vehicles blindly programmed to preserve the selfish molecules known as genes. This is a truth which still fills me with astonishment.”

If any human lacked certain traits like the drive to drink water when dehydrated, the ability to feel pain, the desire to find and retain mates, etc. this would make them far less likely to reproduce. As a result, the organism’s genes would not be preserved over time, and genes with these properties would live on through the generations.

For this reason, our minds are made up of (literal) algorithms which take in environmental and social data as inputs, process it to produce cognitions and emotions, and ultimately result in behavioral outputs. Every pattern of thought and emotion exists to bring about adaptive behaviors based on complex environmental input data. Our minds contain a massive network of if-then relationships.

The entire process of natural selection served to program the human mind by preserving components of the human algorithm that helped preserve and replicate genes in our ancestral environment. Though it was done unintentionally over the course of millions of years, it resulted in the finely tuned piece of software that people today still run, even though we no longer live in this environment.

Sometimes I like to imagine a couple of anthropomorphic strips of DNA hunched over a computer trying to optimize the human algorithm:

“Did you build that code to keep the humans from getting hooked on video games and potentially failing to pass us on?”

“Not yet, but give me another two million years.”

Many of our modern problems are the result of evolutionary mismatch – the conundrum caused by previously adaptive traits becoming maladaptive in the modern world, which is radically different from our ancestral environments in many ways. Our minds were not built, for example, to understand, remember, and predict complex, modern phenomena with perfect accuracy. These goals are all biologically beside the point.

In the modern world, your genes would have you gamble away all your money, have unprotected sex, murder a funny-looking stranger on the subway, and be home in time for an ice cream sundae dinner, which might make for a fun day at the expense of the rest of your life.

But some of our biases and problematic tendencies can be linked directly to biological pressures, meaning it was in some way advantageous to our genes for us to systematically misperceive reality, suffer, or act against our own values.

Whether we realize it or not, and our genes would very much prefer that we didn’t, we live to serve our genetic masters. We are rational and irrational, reflective and impulsive, selfish and altruistic when it helps our genes. We die when it helps our genes (some animals die immediately after reproducing, but humans are kept around for a few more decades to help take care of their offspring).

Neither our evolutionary programmer nor our genetic masters care about our individual interests in the slightest. Uplifting, I know.

Some people find this view depressing, but when you follow it to its full conclusions, I can assure you that an optimistic, empowering, and meaningful path can be constructed from the remains of broken illusions.