If you dig deep enough into a person’s psyche you will hit a bedrock of trauma. It all starts with something going wrong. Why else would we need our genes to be defined by self replication? The melanin in our skin to cope with the trauma of ionizing rays, the adipose tissue to cope with the trauma of starvation.
But Entropy is mighty and vengeful. It gets more creative with its punishments the harder we disobey its verdicts. It makes other living, experiencing beings inflict unimaginable pain against us, skin us alive and render our fat and drink our blood all for some convoluted delusional show of superiority against it.
But those acts of brutality are hardly the beginning. The actual punishment begins with the knowledge that we always need to be vigilant. The worst is always possible. The predator in the woods or the alleyway was the end of someone’s life, not just a story for entertainment. Not to mention the predator at the party. And the one at work. And the one pretending to sleep on the other side of the bed.
Of course that is all hardly enough as punishment. So you come to recognize the same traumas everywhere soon enough. First few times someone comes clean about their pain and fear takes you by surprise, for the fact that you yourself went through the same. Maybe you are not alone. But then you start recognizing that flash of anger and fear every time you try to reach out. You recognize it in yourself too, any time someone unexpectedly approaches you. You come to realize the anger is coming from suddenly having to account for a new person as a potential threat. The more different you seem to be from them, the more effort it takes. The closer you let them, even more effort. You eventually stop trying and go your separate ways, and grow more different as you each explore life keeping away. And eventually we all find ourselves alone and easy pickings for those predators we feared so much.
That’s how Entropy tricked us to invent social norms and ceremony. If we all explore the same things and all get subjected to the same traumas, we will not grow apart. Talk the same, eat the same, express affection the same. We came to punish any deviations, burn people alive just for having slightly different aesthetics. Who is to say you do not dress a little off because you are actually a bloodthirsty monster pretending to be normal and trying to trick people into an untimely demise? We will even continuously invent sanctioned ways to deviate from norms so that no one can ever dare to claim to be persecuted for no fault of their own.
And that is how life was made to be its own punishment. We are lonely ghosts roaming the face of Earth, trapped in fleshy automata acting out some play. We all blend in the background, yearning for someone to come out of it to embrace. But we sinned by coming into existence to be embraced. And our punishment is to be never truly embraced.