Human ingenuity is nothing short of fascinating.  Ignore gods and myths and you’ll find we sprang from nothing, proto-humans scavenging for sustenance by day, scurrying to survive by night. Prometheus didn’t mercifully gift us fire; we died over and over again, only enduring long enough to procreate and watch our offspring invent new methods that made life less cruel. We fought and experimented and through attrition grew into what we are now. Things were simpler then. We looked at a deer and saw answers to our immediate problems. Muscles and organs we could gnash with our teeth to stay fed, bones we could fashion into crude tools and weapons, skins to keep us warm.  We didn’t know that each of those components were made of cells: tiny, incomprehensible things containing the fundamental molecules that make up life. Smaller than that, inside each cell were their own micro-organs called organelles, themselves composed of macromolecules from carbohydrates, proteins, nucleic acids. Systems within systems within systems, all adding up to fulfill human needs in the form of a deer. There was of course no way for us to know the depth of those systems. And would it have mattered if we did? Does the amino acid inside the protein inside the organelle inside the cell know that it exists to serve a whole that it will never comprehend? Or does it live and function on a reactive level, unthinking but always moving? Our world grows ever more complicated as we carve out a more nuanced understanding on a micro and macro level. We uncover layer after layer, further filling our minds with infinite new considerations. Each day we can gain new perspectives on something irrelevant to our basic, survival-focused functions. Now consider our own systems we live by. We grasp for order wherever possible. Great plains once filled with game were ripped apart and built up into grid-based cities, fast food restaurants now on every corner. We travel by way of public transit guided by carefully considered timetables. We instituted currency and laws that determine what we can and cannot do.  Keep going.  We have social systems that govern our place among our peers. We live on autopilot, reacting to an invisible second layer of life known as the internet as it greedily slurps up our attention and alters our sense of worth. Don’t stop now. We form cities, states, countries, and nations. We create economies and uphold philosophies. We’ve walked on the fucking moon. All of these disconnected events and systems have varying short-term goals but ultimately pursue order. So I ask you this. What if everything we think we know, everything we deem important — what if it’s not? What if we are the protein? What if humankind is just meat that’s tricked itself into thinking it has a grander purpose? If humankind and everything it has built is the organelle, what great leviathan do we unknowingly form?