The system that controls and to which the individual is connected, understood as the set of actions that we carry out in our day to day, conceives the evolution of the human being as a quantitative and materialistic issue. That is to say, we come into this world with nothing in our pockets and to see how much we will be able to fill them before the time comes for us to leave, again with them empty. Even for those who, exclusively, understand their life as going up the steps on the ladder of money and success, basing their existence on the only opportunity that earthly life represents for these people, it seems a contradiction to strive to gather the greatest number of material goods possible knowing that, sooner or later, they will remain here and they will not be able to take them with them after their death.
There have been numerous cultures in human civilization that buried their dead with material objects of all kinds and riches in order for them to continue enjoying them in the afterlife. However, there have been many archaeological findings that show that such material goods continue here, on this side.
There are those who, however, maintain that human evolution has little or nothing to do with a material component. And in this regard it is very interesting what, in a talk for the channel Somos Alma, tells us the popularizer and PhD in Chemical Sciences, Vicent Guillem:
The goal of life is not to suffer, but to evolve to be increasingly happy. And when I talk about evolving, I mean developing our capacity to love.
When explaining this idea, Guillem makes a curious and accurate distinction between wisdom and intelligence:
For me wisdom is the knowledge of feelings. Intelligence is the development of mind; wisdom is the development of love. A truly wise person is one who has developed into feelings. A person who has no feelings and knows a lot on a mental level is intelligent, but not wise. We come to life to acquire wisdom in order to be happier. If we are not, it is because we are still, at an evolutionary level, quite immature.
He is clear about both the cause and the remedy for existential suffering:
The main root of suffering is the selfishness of the human being. And the job is to eliminate selfishness and develop the ability to love. What happens is that since people don't become aware that we have come to do this, life passes and we have not learned anything.
