What does it mean to be human?

It means we’re a complex omnivorous social ape with big brains meant to facilitate social groups no bigger than 150 fellow humans, with a minimum ideally around 12. We seem to do best gaining subsistence through hunting, gathering, and gardening, managing to stay fed/minimize lean times using social systems such as gift economies, which also helps maintain egalitarianism leading to overall reduced stress and increased happiness.

We have thumbs? :P

We’re pack creatures, and require communication, and if we know what communication is, we have emotions and an awareness that spawns it. Therefore guilt, therefore this illusion that is ’‘humanity’’ which is actually just justification. But justification for what? There’s always an excuse to everything, good and bad, otherwise we wouldn’t do it. Crom, even you won’t know if we were good men, or bad. Why we fought, and why we died. All that matters is that me and my wallet are starving.

Who’s to say that the lion doesn’t thank God after his bitch brings him his food? Grab an ant and tell him you’re superior to him. You can kill the little ant yeah, but you can’t make him understand that you’re superior to him. I often think that things like crows, vultures or cockroaches are actually hippies, and all spiritual and shit. Damn tree huggers. Or maybe they’re opportunist and cowards. But who’s going to criticize the raven for feeding upon the dead and having no honour?
But when little Symbeline robs a grave, it’s a big huge drama.
I don’t know what being human is besides some Rob Zombie song, I just know that we happen to be the meanest motherfuckers in the jungle.

Disclaimer Don’t take this post seriously.

To err.

It means that we have the greatest responsibility of any other mammal on the planet.

Being a miserable pile of secrets.

It just means you are not an animal, piece of vegetation, rock, etc.

In other words, try not to think too hard about it.

This is my answer on a really, really good day.

Being human is to be half animal, half saint. The same human who cradles his small child gently will happily pound his enemy into a quivering mass of bloody protoplasm. Humans have responsibility for all living things, and yet behave at times with incredible irresponsibility. To be human means that you can aspire to the very heavens themselves, or wind up in the gutter drunk and sick and lost.

People speak of “the human condition” as though it has an independent existence, but it’s a “condition” we create for ourselves.

@ragingloli Awesome.

Now please stop smashing all your wine glasses everywhere, I’m trying to make the world a better place here. XD

@Symbeline I took your second paragraph especially seriously, and I now think you are a Zen saint.

@Ladymia69 I think some of that in there was serious…but seriously…maybe we can kill animals and know how they act, to some point…but we don’t know what it’s like to be in their shoes.

Wait animals don’t wear shoes. Me so silly. :D

To have a hole in your heart called greed

Ability to plan the future, flexible hands and bipedalism.

The ability to mentally organize sensory date into percepts and then to organize percepts into objectively correct abstractions, and then, having done that, to have the ability to choose the appropriate action.