You Were Made for One Purpose

You hatch in the abyss. Millimeters long. Translucent. Equipped with oversized eyes and an olfactory system that puts bloodhounds to shame. No functional mouth. No stomach worth mentioning. You’re born already starving, already dying, maybe a few weeks before your body consumes itself.

But you have one purpose, encoded so deep in your DNA it might as well be the only thought you’ll ever have: find her.

The ocean is three-dimensional darkness. The volume of water you must search could swallow continents. The odds of encountering another living thing—let alone the right living thing—are astronomical. You’re a microscopic needle looking for a haystack in a warehouse full of warehouses.

But you swim. You follow the chemical trail she leaves in the water, a breadcrumb path of pheromones that might lead to salvation or dissipate into nothing. Days pass. Your body eats itself. Your eyes, those magnificent eyes, begin to dim.

And then you smell her.

She’s enormous. Everything. Her body mass dwarfs yours by a factor of fifty, maybe more. She’s the answer to the only question you were built to ask.

You swim to her side. Open your mouth. Bite down.

Your teeth sink into her flesh and a cocktail of enzymes floods the wound. No pain—not for you, anyway. Only the certainty of connection, the irreversible commitment. Your body knows what to do even if you don’t. The teeth fuse. The tissues begin to merge.

And then you begin to die.

We are survival machines—robot vehicles blindly programmed to preserve the selfish molecules known as genes.

Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene

Except it’s not death. Not exactly. It’s dissolution. Metamorphosis. The ugliest kind of transformation.

Your eyes, those beautiful adaptive organs that found her in the infinite dark, cloud over. They’re expensive to maintain, metabolically speaking, and you don’t need them anymore. You’re not going anywhere. Your fins atrophy, useless appendages on a body that will never swim again. Your digestive system, already vestigial, shuts down completely.

You’re becoming something else. Something less.

Her blood vessels grow into your body. Your circulatory system merges with hers. You’re no longer eating—you’re being fed. Parasite. Dependent. A living IV drip running in reverse. Nutrients flow from her bloodstream into yours. Your waste flows back.

Your brain shrinks.

This is the part that should terrify you, if you still had enough brain left to be terrified. The organ that houses whatever you are—your awareness, your drive, your selfhood—is being systematically dismantled. Neurons pruned back. Structures simplified. Lights going out, room by room, until there’s almost nothing left.

At what point do you stop being you?

Is it when you lose your eyes, your window to the world? When your brain dips below some critical threshold of complexity? When your heart stops beating independently and becomes just another muscle slaved to her rhythm?

Or was there never really a “you” to begin with—just a guided missile made of meat, programmed for a single terminal trajectory?

The philosophers would have a field day with this if they gave a damn about anglerfish. Personal identity. Continuity of consciousness. The Ship of Theseus, if Theseus dissolved into the ship and the ship absorbed his liquefied remains.

But you’re past philosophy now. Past thought, probably. You’re a gonadic appendage. A sperm factory. A biological subsystem that used to be an independent organism, now demoted to organ status.

You had a name once. Male. Individual. Alive.

Now you’re just tissue.

This is where I, as a Catholic who believes humans bear the image of God, start getting uncomfortable. Because if personhood can dissolve this completely—if “you” can be reduced to metabolic function without remainder—what does that say about the nature of identity itself? What does it say about us?

What is man that you are mindful of him, the son of man that you care for him? You made him a little lower than the angels.

Psalm 8:4-5

While you’ve been dissolving into biological existentialism, she’s been going about her business. Hunting in the dark. Surviving in a place that makes the Mojave Desert look like a buffet.

And you’re not her only passenger.

Look closer at her body—really look. Those lumps, those protrusions dotting her sides like grotesque tumors? Those are males. Sometimes two. Sometimes six. Sometimes more. Each one a former individual who made the same irreversible choice you did, who bit down and held on and paid the price of admission with everything he was.

She’s a living gallery of absorbed selves.

The biology here is almost harder to believe than the horror. Her immune system should be attacking them, treating these foreign bodies like the invasive tissue they are. Every rule of immunology says this shouldn’t work—tissue rejection, antibody response, inflammation, necrosis. But somehow, her body accepts them. Tolerates them. Incorporates them.

It’s the same black magic that lets a human mother carry a fetus without her immune system declaring war. Except permanent. She’ll carry these males until she dies, her body a cruise ship for the genetically foreign, her bloodstream feeding a half-dozen organisms that are no longer quite organisms.

Is she still alone? She’s got company, technically. But her companions have no eyes, no brains, no capacity for anything you’d recognize as experience. She might as well be decorated with fleshy ornaments. Christmas tree balls with a pulse.

The merged circulatory system creates an intimacy we don’t have words for. More than sex. More than symbiosis. She’s tethered to them forever, her blood pressure their blood pressure, her oxygen their oxygen. When her heart beats, theirs beat. When she metabolizes food, they receive the nutrients secondhand, through her generosity or her surplus—the distinction doesn’t matter.

She’s not a monster. She’s solving an equation. The equation says: in a void this vast, with encounters this rare, you take what you can get and hold on.

But multiple absorbed selves fused to your flesh, drawing life from your veins? That’s body horror no matter how you slice it.

The deep sea made them do this.

Consider the math. The ocean’s aphotic zone—where sunlight gives up—starts around 200 meters down. The abyssal plains where many anglerfish live can be 4,000 meters deep and stretch for thousands of square kilometers. The population density is a rounding error. You could search for years and never encounter another member of your species.

The problem: how do you reproduce when finding a mate is statistically equivalent to winning the lottery, except the lottery is dark and cold and trying to kill you?

Most fish solve this with spawning aggregations. Get everyone together once a year, dump gametes into the water, call it good. But that requires navigation, coordination, timing. It requires enough population density to make the system work.

The anglerfish went a different direction.

They said: what if the male just… stayed? What if instead of two fish finding each other, mating, and parting ways, the male became a permanent fixture? Guaranteed sperm supply, on-demand, no searching required.

Natural selection loved this idea. The males who fused successfully reproduced. The ones who didn’t—who tried to stay independent, who searched for multiple mates, who valued their autonomy—died virgins in the dark. Their line ended. Their strategy lost.

The genes that made males into disposable drones proliferated. The genes that made females into carriers proliferated. The system locked in, reinforced by thousands of generations of brutal selective pressure.

And here’s the thing: it works.

The male wins, genetically speaking. His DNA makes it into the next generation, which is the only victory evolution recognizes. That his conscious experience—if it can be called that—is abbreviated and horrific doesn’t register. That he loses his body, his brain, his selfhood means exactly nothing.

Natural selection optimizes for one thing only: more DNA tomorrow. It doesn’t care about dignity. Doesn’t care about autonomy. Doesn’t care if you spend your entire adult life as a parasitic testicle.

We look at the anglerfish and see tragedy. Nature sees Tuesday.

The anthropomorphic trap is thinking nature should care, that there’s some cosmic justice or fairness baked into biological systems. There isn’t. Evolution is a blind watchmaker, an idiot savant solving problems with whatever works, elegance and ethics be damned.

Praying mantises eat their mates. Some spiders do too. Certain barnacles have penises eight times their body length because broadcast spawning is hard and sometimes you need to get creative. Bedbugs reproduce via traumatic insemination—exactly as horrible as it sounds.

The anglerfish strategy is just another solution in a catalog of solutions, each one more disturbing than the last when viewed through the lens of human values. But human values aren’t the scoring system. Gene transmission is the scoring system. Everything else is commentary.

The male anglerfish traded his existence for reproductive certainty. In the only currency evolution recognizes, he’s a millionaire.

Between the conception and the creation falls the shadow.

T.S. Eliot

The male ceratioid is born knowing his ending.

No ambiguity, no existential crisis, no lying awake wondering what it’s all for. His purpose is encoded, deterministic, inevitable. Find the female. Fuse. Provide sperm. No alternative paths, no “what ifs,” no unlived lives haunting him with their possibility.

In a perverse way, he has something we don’t: certainty.

We spend our lives constructing meaning, trying to figure out what we’re supposed to do with the improbable gift of consciousness. We write philosophies and religions and self-help books. We pivot careers, question our choices, wonder if we’re wasting our potential. We’re haunted by the specter of purposelessness, the fear that our lives might add up to nothing.

The male anglerfish has no such concerns. He’s a heat-seeking missile with fins. His trajectory is set before he’s born.

Is that freedom or the ultimate prison?

You could argue it’s liberation. No anxiety about meaning. No decision paralysis. No regret. Just one pure, clear directive and the biological machinery to carry it out. He experiences—if he experiences anything—a kind of monastic focus we can barely imagine.

Or you could argue it’s the most profound imprisonment possible. Agency without choice. A life where every action leads inexorably to the same endpoint: dissolution. He’s a wind-up toy pointed in one direction, and when he reaches the end, he stops being a toy at all.

We tell ourselves we’re different. We have free will, autonomy, self-determination. We’re not slaves to our biology.

But how different are we, really?

We’re born with drives we didn’t choose. Hunger. Fear. The desire to reproduce. The need for social connection. These aren’t suggestions; they’re imperatives, written in the same genetic code that tells the male anglerfish to swim toward the pheromone trail. We can resist them, redirect them, sublimate them into art or ambition or ideology, but they’re still there, pulling the strings.

We build elaborate narratives about our choices, our freedom, our individuality. Maybe those narratives are true in some meaningful sense. But strip them away and we’re still organisms optimizing for survival and reproduction, running programs written by natural selection, convinced we’re the authors of our own stories when we’re more like characters in a book we didn’t write.

But here’s where the Catholic in me pushes back on my own metaphor.

The anglerfish and I are both pulled by biological imperatives we didn’t choose. That part’s true. But there’s a difference between being pulled and being only pulled.

I have something he doesn’t: the capacity to recognize the strings, to name them, and—at least sometimes—to choose a different response. Not to eliminate the drives. Not to pretend they don’t exist. But to direct them, sublimate them, even resist them when they conflict with something I value more.

The hunger is real. The fear is real. The drive to reproduce is real. But I can fast. I can run toward danger for a principle. I can choose celibacy, or self-sacrifice, or a life that makes no genetic sense whatsoever.

The anglerfish can’t. He has instinct, stimulus-response, genetic programming. I have reason, conscience, and will—however constrained, however influenced by biology, however imperfect in execution.

That’s not just complexity. That’s a different kind of thing.

The Catholic philosophical tradition calls this having a rational soul—the capacity for abstract thought, moral reasoning, and self-determination that separates humans from even the most complex animals. You don’t have to buy the metaphysics to recognize the distinction. Humans can choose poverty for principle. We can die for abstractions. We can look at our biological imperatives and say “no” for reasons that have nothing to do with genetic fitness.

But if I’m being honest about what I believe—what I hope—the distinction goes even deeper than reason and will. The anglerfish is pulled only by his genetic strings. We’re pulled by those same strings, yes. But there’s another thread, too. A thread of divine love, beckoning us not just to redirect our programming but to transcend it entirely. To shed what the scriptures call “the natural man” and participate in the life of God himself—what the Eastern Orthodox call Theosis. Not that we become God in any ontological sense, but that we can become the fullness of the divine image we were created to bear.

That’s not a claim I can prove with biology or philosophy. It’s hope. Maybe even faith. But it means the distance between the anglerfish and me isn’t just the distance between instinct and reason. It’s the distance between a creature made for genetic continuity and a creature made for communion with the eternal.

I can’t prove that’s true. But I can’t shake the sense that we’re made for something the anglerfish never glimpses—something that doesn’t just redirect the hunger but satisfies it in a way genetic transmission never could.

The anglerfish makes the strings visible. That’s valuable—maybe essential. We are biological creatures with drives shaped by evolution. We do construct elaborate narratives that sometimes obscure how much we’re shaped by forces we didn’t choose.

But we’re not just that. The anglerfish has purpose without choice. We have purpose and choice—which means we can fulfill our purpose, refuse it, or find some third way that neither pure biology nor pure will could predict.

The tragedy isn’t that we’re meat puppets. The tragedy is we have just enough freedom to screw it up.

The male anglerfish makes the puppetry visible.

He’s what all organisms are, distilled to purest form: a vehicle for genetic continuity. He doesn’t pretend otherwise. Doesn’t need the comforting fiction of agency. He swims, he bites, he dissolves, and his DNA continues. Mission accomplished.

We look at him and recoil, not because his fate is unique, but because it’s too honest. It strips away the pretense and shows us the transaction beneath: existence in exchange for reproduction. Your body, your mind, your sense of self—all of it expendable, all of it negotiable, if it means your genes make it to the next round.

The anglerfish doesn’t have the luxury of lying to himself about this.

Neither, when you think about it, do we.

The only way to deal with an unfree world is to become so absolutely free that your very existence is an act of rebellion.

Camus

Picture her now, drifting through the aphotic zone. A female anglerfish, bioluminescent lure dangling in front of her mouth, drawing prey to their doom. Her body scarred, mottled, shaped by the crushing pressure and the absence of light.

And attached to her sides, fused into her flesh, are the males. Four of them, maybe. Or six. Small lumps of tissue where complex organisms used to be. No eyes. No brains worth mentioning. Just gonads and a heartbeat, sustained by her blood, waiting to release sperm when she signals it’s time.

They’re a constellation of dissolved selves. A gallery of surrendered autonomy. Each one made the same choice: bite down, hold on, pay the price.

Did they choose? Can you call it choice when every fiber of your being, every chemical signal in your brain, every evolutionary adaptation is screaming the same command?

We’re disturbed by the anglerfish because he makes the invisible visible. He takes the abstract horror of biological determinism and renders it in flesh. We don’t like to think of ourselves as meat puppets dancing to genetic music, but here’s an organism that has no choice but to accept that reality, to embody it so completely there’s no room left for comfortable delusions.

He’s what we fear we might be: purpose without agency, meaning without choice, a life that culminates in total dissolution.

And yet his genes continue. His strategy works. In the only game that matters—the evolutionary long game—he’s a winner.

The female drifts deeper, hunting in the dark, carrying her passengers with her. They’re no longer individuals. They’re part of her now, subsumed, absorbed, relegated to the status of organs in someone else’s body.

What they were is gone. What they became is disturbing.

But they’re still there, fused to her flesh, their DNA waiting for its moment. Strange intimacy. Necessary horror. A solution that works because it has to.

The abyss doesn’t care about your comfort. It only cares that you survive.

And in the crushing dark, where light cannot reach and encounters are rarer than miracles, the anglerfish found a way.

Even if that way requires you to become a brainless scrotum permanently affixed to your mate.

Even if that way costs you everything you are.

Even if, in the end, there’s barely enough of you left to call it “you” at all.

Evolution doesn’t give a shit about your feelings.

It only cares that your genes wake up tomorrow, in new bodies, ready to do it all again.

We’re all puppets, in a sense. The anglerfish dances to one set of strings—genetic code written in the dark, optimized for nothing but continuation.

But maybe we dance to two. The genetic strings pull hard, and we’d be fools to pretend they don’t. But that other thread—the one I can’t prove exists but can’t stop believing in—pulls too. Beckoning us toward something that makes no evolutionary sense. Something that transcends the brutal logic of the abyss.

The anglerfish can’t feel both. Can’t even conceive of anything beyond the imperative encoded in his cells.

We can. And that tension—between burden and hope, between the strings we can see and the thread we can only sense—might be exactly where human dignity lives.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​