meaning of life and peanut butter

I was sitting in a Vertebrate form and function lecture there a couple days ago. It’s a very interesting module, and besides the fact that the labs include a rat dissection (RIP Minnie...yes I named my rat Minnie), I’m very glad I decided to do it.
So the professor (a total PILF by the way) was talking about the nervous system and then said in passing, like it was no big deal, “There are wave lengths of light we can’t see, dimensions we can’t perceive and sound waves we can’t here, so how we perceive the world isn’t at all how it is” and then went on to describe the structure of the spine.
But I have to say that totally metaphorically knocked me off my chair. The chair being my concept of reality.
Even though, passively I knew all those things I had just never put them together before.
Then, in a metabolism lecture, the professor (not a PILF by the way) described, in the sense of a chemical reaction, that when we die and release gases that we are IN EQUILIBRIUM WITH THE UNIVERSE. Isn’t that just the most fantastic thing you’ve ever heard? Doesn’t make death sound so bad, just the completion of a reaction that must end. Atoms can’t be destroyed or made, so you just lose you’re structure, not the basis of yourself, I mean that physically, obviously you being alive is pretty important to being yourself....”Lucy just hasn’t been herself since her death”
These were all sort of mind blowing concepts to just be said in passing like that. It hurts my head, it’s the type of mental aerobatics best left to the philosophers and makes me want to run to a television to give my brain a snooze.
So I was thinking, you often hear people say that life is so incredible, so complex and so beautiful, and how could it all just be a merical of cosmic parking? But perhaps it’s only so incredible, so complex, and so beautiful because we find it hard to comprehend.
Every biochemical reaction, every mechanism, every property, could be as simple are the alphabet in a higher state of consciousness.
Ok I better not think that hard or I may hurt myself.
But consider this, (The slip that brought me to my knees failed What if all these fantasies come flailing around now I've said too much)
Consider the fact that we as humans, are probably (I say probably because I have no researched, just wondered it) the only living thing that enjoys doing itself harm. We get pleasure out of doing bad things to ourselves, surely there would be some sort of evolutionary trait to makes just not want to do these things that harm us? Why would a self destruct button be so fun to press? Where’s the divine design in that?
So many bad things feel so good, to quote Trainspotting “we wouldn’t do heroin if we didn’t enjoy it”
Surely something that is so damaging should feel bad?! That’s why we have pain receptors, so we don’t walk around bleeding and forget to do anything about it. Our bodies our designed to never get used to pain, no matter how much we endure pain is always painful so we always know we are being damaged, that is the purpose of it.
Besides the occasional elephant getting drunk on fermented fruit, I don’t think I’ve seen this type of behaviour except in the ever paradoxical human.

Why does pain go up to such levels? If the purpose of pain is to give us the idea that we are in danger then it needn’t go up beyond the level where we realise something is wrong. If someone gets the message at level 8, why does the pain go up to level 17? What’s the point in that? Why would we be designed in that way?

As someone who writes a bit, I feel I hold on too much to the Zimmer frame of analogy. I tried to confront some ponderings of mine in here; as usual I don’t feel I conveyed my queries properly. Oh well.

There is one philosophy I’m sure of; peanut butter makes everything better.