system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
ELI5: why does every element want to be iron?

I was just reading about how the sun isn’t “burning” so much as constantly exploding and sucking in more hydrogen to explode more. In the article is said that every element wants to be iron, so when an element is higher than iron, it goes through fission, and when it’s lower than iron it goes through fusion. Up until it becomes iron, cause everything wants to be iron. 

Why? What does that mean? What’s so special about iron?
gpt
Light elements release more energy when they fuse than is required to fuse them, and heavy elements release more energy when they split than is required to split them. Iron is in the middle of that.

If you keep fusing elements on the core of a star, you eventually get to iron, but then the process runs out. Similarly, if you keep fissioning atoms, you eventually get to iron, and then it's mostly not possible to split atoms further.