Explain SMBC — the wiki for Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal

This comic opens with a poetic, existential meditation on hair: the eyes may be the window to the soul, but hair -- the "most dead" part of you -- will linger long after death. It won't notice your heart stopping or your blood chilling. And yet it's the part people take the most care of, the part they hope the world appreciates, because deep down they know nobody will ever truly understand what their life meant, "so you might as well burnish the lie."

The punchline reveals this morose philosophical monologue is actually a commercial -- for a product called "The Human Condition(er)." The joke is a pun on "conditioner" (as in hair conditioner) and "the human condition" (the existential state of being human). The comic satirizes how advertising co-opts deep philosophical and emotional language to sell mundane products, while also poking fun at the tendency to find profound meaning in trivial aspects of grooming and appearance.