together-3
Explanation
This comic presents a first-contact scenario where aliens arrive to deliver humanity's purpose, only to discover that humans are too neurotic to accept it.
Aliens land and announce they've come to share "the glorious future" with humanity. The goal of all ethics, they say, is to generate the most happiness. They've spent "hundreds of years" working on this project and have figured out how to convert the universe into a single consciousness of eternal bliss.
But there are caveats from the human side: "We don't want our planet to lose its character," "We don't want to lose our identity," "We want to be us." The aliens are baffled -- they've observed that humans are stressed, anxious, and constantly engaged in petty status competitions. Humans want their cars to be better than their neighbors'. They cling to their problems.
The punchline comes when the aliens point out the contradiction: "You humans are really gonna cling to your sad, boring, petty existence while every other species in creation is converging to cosmic communion?" The humans respond: "You know what, we're both right. Let's compromise" -- which of course isn't a compromise at all, since the alien proposal is all-or-nothing.
The humor satirizes humanity's paradoxical attachment to suffering and status anxiety. Even offered literal cosmic paradise, humans would rather keep comparing cars and feeling anxious. It's a commentary on how deeply wired our petty concerns are -- we'd literally turn down eternal bliss to maintain our neurotic sense of individual identity.