SENTIENCE

If you are secular and scientific in your view of how mankind has evolved on this planet, the dreadnaught moment has to be when we became sentient.

Sentient means to be able to perceive or feel things such as a woman who had been instructed from birth in the equality of all sentient life forms.

There was a recent comic strip that had a religious figure shut the door on all other lower life forms when he became sentient. He found his self-awareness and declared himself to be alone in the world.

I always said that on LOST knowledge was power. Those characters who controlled things knew how the island operated and used personal information to gain an advantage.

Those characters (Ben, Widmore, Eloise) clearly dominated characters who were more emotionally based such as Jack, Sun, Michael, Hurley, Sayid, Kate and Locke, who at some point felt that they were alone in the world.

The ability to perceive that one is not truly alone, even in the midst of personal despair, depression or loneliness, is one explanation of the theory that the show was merely a "character study" and not a drama. If one looks at the series as a quilt of personal relationship studies, like medical studies for the observation of new treatments, then when if at all did the characters come to the understanding of where they fit in the world?

Clearly, some of the characters never matured in any fashion, like Shannon.
Clearly, some of the characters continued to be haunted by their past actions, such as Sayid.
Clearly, some of the characters never wanted to take responsibility and grow up, like Kate and even Hurley.
Clearly, some characters were motivated by revenge which took away any pursuit of happiness, like with Sawyer and Ben.
And clearly, some characters took on leadership duties which caused them to become isolated and lonely, like Jack.

The plots merely swirled the characters personality traits and flaws in a primordial soup to see if anyone would evolve beyond their faults. Most of them continued to believe that they were vacant islands in the world. They were loners who only had to deal with others at arms length. It would be an open debate on whether anyone did evolve.

Kate continued to be runaway Kate through the bitter end at the sideways church.
Jack continued to be flawed Jack as he wound back up with broken Kate in the end.
Why Hurley and Sayid would become soul mates with women that they only met for weeks before their demise is a puzzling fiction - - - or is it an emotional lesson that the last person you cared about is the only person who will ever matter in eternity? That seems not to be a perception, but desperate clinging to someone you could not have. That sort of explains Sawyer and Juliet.

Many viewers had their emotional attachments to certain characters and certain storylines (such as Desmond and Penny relationship) which was enough to perceive LOST as a great show (for them). Perhaps, that is why many people are satisfied with the ending because their favorite lonely characters found some form of happiness in the end.