Issue No. 82

I sometimes think I was more afraid than I thought I was. I had dark days I couldn’t keep as memories, let alone share with anyone else. They simply would not believe it was real. In fact, I’ve probably convinced myself they were all just imagination—perhaps fragments of a nightmare. Or perhaps there is no distinction between my nightmares and the reality of life. I was afraid of all of it but I did them anyway.

The truth is, living is a terrifying thing. We all exist under the collective delusion that nothing bad will happen to us the next morning when we wake up. Yet, every day, someone else’s fear becomes their reality. The very thing we dread happens to someone at this very moment. Be it going bankrupt, losing an entire family in a house fire, suffering severe burns, losing limbs, going blind from a work accident, being bombed by a suicide drone on the Ukrainian front lines, seeing the lifeless body of your partner cut in half after a road accident, or seeing your face stitched beyond recognition after being shot—who can say it won’t be us next time?

I once saw an interview with a man who saved his fiancée from a fire. She was safe, but he was burned. He survived with one limb and permanently scarred skin, without a single hair on his body. Children described him as the stuff of nightmares. To make it worse, his fiancée left him because she could no longer bear to see him in his condition. Perhaps guilt killed her love for him, or perhaps he allowed her to leave, knowing she would have to care for him forever. What a sad, sad story.

But do you know what you should really fear? Not death, not oblivion, not accidents, not losing all your possessions.

It’s the lack of meaning in an uncaring world.

As you read this, take a moment to look around you. Absorb reality. Feel your skin, your face, your desk, your chair, and look at your reflection in the mirror. Is there meaning in all of this?

Albert Camus, a major proponent of absurdism, argued that life inherently lacks meaning. According to this view, any attempt to find meaning is ultimately futile because the universe is indifferent to human concerns. The universe is not alive. Our existence is an inevitable anomaly in the infinite passage of time. Everything and anything will exist if you wait long enough, but in the immensity of time and space, you and I do not matter.

Why do we spend our time rushing, worrying, and hating what we have to do? What a sad, sad way to live. Imagine being given 80 years to live, only to spend 60 of those years working with blood, sweat, and tears for scraps, just to visit fewer than 20 countries in the remaining frail 20 years of existence. If you’re lucky, you do it with someone you love.

Not everyone is lucky.

It sounds depressing when you think about it, but since everything is meaningless, what stops us from creating meaning? Maybe that’s what it’s all about. The world is meaningless because we are meant to create that meaning. That is our mission in life. It’s likely the ultimate answer to the question: “What’s the purpose of life?”

It’s to create, not find, your meaning.

What if you could create it today? What if you could not fail? What would you do? What if, despite all your doubts, insecurities, shortcomings, imperfections, and failures, you refused to give up? What if you embraced courage like breakfast in the morning and stepped out, facing the sunlight striking your skin? What if you were not afraid of failure, of regrets, of the loneliness of a dark alley, or the eeriness of an empty road at a foggy dawn surrounded by the lifeless trees of a forest? Where would you be? Would you have gone far?

Until next week,