Pointless Speculations on Life’s Mysteries

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People continue to speculate on the identity of Jack the Ripper, not because it matters, not because it is in anyway important (countless have died in the intervening years, not knowing) but because people don’t like the idea of being beaten by a mystery. To die never knowing seems to be a torture to them. The absolute impossibility of knowing, the frustrating horror of pure, black ignorance is something that has to be escaped by any available means, including baseless speculation and fiction. The big mysteries of life, the ones that no amount of scientific knowledge can truly satisfy, the ones about what happens after death and what happened in the undocumented past (who was Jack, really?), those are torture to the brain that demands answers, that wants to break the nature of life and time, to bring it under control. Some escape into science fiction where fantasies of time machine and alternate dimensions exist, and into religion where, if you roll your own you can basically devise anything for an after life that you want, confident that you will not be proven wrong in this life. 
A great deal of human efforts seem to involve wishful thinking, creating and substituting fiction for fact where the facts, or the lack of them, cannot provide satisfaction. Like a dildo to a wife with an impotent husband. 
Jack the Ripper, whoever he was, got away with it. He broke the law and he won. He showed up at the right time in history and he did what he wanted to do and there will be no closure. There can only be theories.
This is where all of your plans become pointless and stupid. Everybody seems to think that they will live forever, so that what happens a century from now is supposedly their business, and what a hundred years back still somehow matters, like we, we the individuals, are connected to those places in some way when we are not. Everything that happened before you were born and everything that will happen after may as well take place on another planet, or else not take place at all. You rent one lot in a neighborhood and you may be evicted at any time. What your neighbors are up to behind closed doors should be of no interest to you. 
Is this to say that history is not important? No, it is not. History is important in the way that it can be a study of human nature and as entertaining as fiction. It is a story written according to human tendency and the unpredictability of nature. It is not a science, and it does not have some big, practical influence on our lives. All it the possibly true anecdotes of people you don’t know, written by people who may or nay not know how to research, and who may or may not have an interest in lying to you.
The whole Jack the Ripper thing, being useless as it is for anything practical, and not being an entertaining mystery in that there is no solution, no answer, no satisfying conclusion to the whole thing gets used to shed light on the miserable lives of women in Victorian London, or it gets used to show how backward detectives of the era were. It is used for entertainment because it is sordid (involves prostitutes), and allows any writer to take on a resolution of his choosing. It comes with a built-in audience, people who have read Alan Moore’s From Hell or some other book full of speculations and enough history to make you feel invested. It’s about marketing, a relatively sure thing for a writer to use to make money.