The human mind is such, that it thrives when it has a meaning and a motive for it´s own existence. That may sound obvious, but from an objective viewpoint there is no absolute meaning. In certain ways everything is futile. I´ve struggled with this a lot in my personal life. I have felt a strong urge to find something, just anything, that would be good and true. If ever I would find a single concrete truth, I could then base my life on that. But meanings are by their very nature subjective. Only a subjective mind would be capable of making up such a concept. So we end up trying to find something we can´t ever find. Our brains are very good at trying to come up with ways to fool ourselves about this. Religion is the usual escape. It makes our brains happy even if it´s not true.
Tea is a meaning. I use it to bring meaning into my life. Objectively speaking it is a random activity. But maybe a non- perfect mammal will have to, at some point in his or hers life, just do whatever it is that feels good. I can take the framework of tea culture and learn about it, immerse myself in it, and use it to carry me in this mysterious journey called life. To feel good is what our brains want to do. I feel good when I drink a nice cup of tea, even if 4.5 billion years from now when the Sun will become a white dwarf it won´t make the least bit of difference whether I drank tea or not. The paradox with humans is that we are seemingly capable of thinking about the idea of objectivity, yet we live in and are bound to a subjective reality.
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