But I’ve seen them from the beginning. It’s certainly never boring to watch. Never, ever dull.

Gabriel Jeroschewitz, July 1st, 2025. Inspired by Kurt Weill, Bertolt Brecht, and Tom Waits, humanity is kept alive. From the Three Penny Opera, the author has abridged the story to keep it from being overkill.

Ah, humans. Please just sit down, if you can remain still for more than ten seconds without checking a small, glowing rectangle or scratching an inexplicable itch. I would like to tell you about humans.

I’ve been observing things for a while now. A very long time. Longer than mountains have been mountains, certainly longer than oceans, decided where they wanted to sit that eon. And in all the swirling cosmic nonsense, the grand ballet of creation and decay, the sudden, inexplicable appearance of things where there was nothing, and the equally bewildering disappearance of things that seemed quite sturdy – nothing, absolutely nothing, is as perplexing, and frankly, as riotously funny, as the human insistence on its logic.

“We are rational beings,” they puff out their chests and declare. “We think, therefore we are.” Oh, they think all right. They think they’re in charge. They think they understand. They think they make sense. It’s adorable like a particularly confident squirrel trying to explain quantum physics while burying a nut in a flowerpot.

Because, observe them. Watch them navigate their day. They wake up, often at a time dictated by an artificial construct called a “job,” for which they exchange their time for pieces of coloured paper or numbers in a digital ledger, which they then use to acquire things they often don’t need, to impress people they usually don’t like. Logical? Where exactly does the logic enter this transaction chain, beyond the primal urge for survival twisted into elaborate games of status?

Consider their priorities. They will spend years acquiring elaborate mating rituals involving expensive shiny objects or cleverly worded phrases to obscure their intentions. They will dedicate immense brainpower to devising complex game rules involving balls or little plastic figures. They will then expend vast emotional energy arguing whether a rule was followed correctly. Meanwhile, the air they breathe warps, the water they drink becomes questionable, and they invent new and exciting ways to be miserable while pursuing “happiness” with single-minded, illogical fervour.

You hear them, too, in their little pronouncements. “We must address the seven deadly sins!” they cry, often the ones who have just had a particularly satisfying second helping of something rich or spent a weekend in bed. They wring their hands about Gluttony and Sloth and Pride, as if these are abstract concepts that arrived via ill wind, rather than inherent, almost delightful, consequences of being a creature built from the universe’s leftover creative energy mixed with impulse control issues.

One old, cynical poem I overheard them muttering once had it roughly right: gentlemen who preach about morals should focus on getting everyone fed first. Because the human capacity for altruism and lofty ideals seems directly proportional to how recently they’ve had a decent meal and how comfortable their shoes are. A hungry human, cold one, or simply one whose daily commute is irritating, is often a creature whose grip on their proclaimed rationality is tenuous at best, and whose inner beast taps impatiently on the cage bars.

They rose from the primordial chaos, a bubbling stew of elements and improbable reactions, guided by nothing so much as chance collisions and the urgent, illogical drive to replicate. And into a state of chaotic interaction they will undoubtedly return, individually and perhaps eventually collectively. Their cities are monuments to attempted order, grids and schedules and traffic lights, all overlaid upon the unpredictable, often bizarre behaviour of the individuals within them. Watch their roads – rivers of metal guided by beings simultaneously listening to music, shouting into a phone, thinking about what’s for dinner, and convinced everyone else on the road is an imbecile. I don’t know what it is if that’s not a microcosm of ordered chaos.

And this duality! This breathtaking, baffling duality! They are capable, oh yes, they are capable of astonishing acts of beauty. They produce sounds that can make your non-existent heart ache, images that capture light in ways that defy probability, and structures that reach for the sky with elegant defiance. They can show incredible tenderness, sacrificing their comfort for the well-being of another, human or otherwise. They can feel empathy, connect across impossible divides, and create intricate tapestries of relationships and shared meaning. They are, truly, capable of being the most wonderful, beautiful things.

And then… oh dear. Then there’s the flip side that proves they haven’t strayed quite as far from the muck as they like to pretend. The casual cruelty they inflict upon each other and the planet that sustains them. The way power seems to curdle their reason, turning them into preening, posturing figures obsessed with dominance. The sheer pettiness! They will wage wars over invisible lines on maps, persecute neighbours over differing opinions on mythology, and sabotage colleagues over the slightest perceived slight or the chance of a fractional increase in their paper/number hoard.

They talk of keeping humanity alive through brilliance; they have flashes of it. But truthfully, as that poem hinted, humanity often survives not despite its darker nature, but because of it, or at least alongside it. The drive to compete, to hoard resources, to defend one’s territory – these are not rational choices, they are primal urges, ancient echoes of the beast that lived before the logic story was invented. Their ability to repress their inherent chaos and bestiality is patchy at best, and often it’s the exercise of these ‘bestial acts’ on a grand or petty scale that dictates who gets the food, who gets the shelter, who survives. Survival isn’t always a clean, logical process; it’s often messy, brutal, and deeply illogical from an ‘enlightened’ perspective. They are kept alive, in part, by maintaining a delicate, unstable truce with their inner animal, a repression that occasionally fails.

So why, you might ask, do they cling so fiercely to this notion of being logical? Perhaps it’s a comfort blanket. A way to feel special, distinct from the animals they pen up or romanticize from a safe distance. Maybe it’s a necessary illusion, the scaffolding that prevents them from collapsing into outright, gibbering madness when faced with the undeniable evidence of their chaotic nature. Perhaps admitting they are simply complex arrangements of stardust and impulse, capable of writing a sonnet in the morning and keying a car in the afternoon, is too much to bear.

Whatever the reason, watching them strive for order while inherently being creatures of chaos is a constant, unfolding comedy. They build intricate plans that are immediately undone by a sudden mood swing or the arrival of doughnuts. They declare universal truths based on particular, fleeting personal experiences. They yearn for peace while perfecting the art of passive-aggressive warfare in staff meetings.

They are illogical, chaotic, sometimes horrifyingly bestial, and capable of breathtaking beauty. They are the universe’s most entertaining paradox, a walking, talking, often tripping, contradiction. And they think they’re logical. It’s magnificently absurd. And in that absurdity, in that beautiful, terrible, funny mess, perhaps that’s where their truth lies. Not in the logic they preach, but in the glorious, unpredictable chaos from which they came, and to which, with any luck, they will return with suitable dramatic flair. It’s certainly never boring to watch. Never, ever dull.