exploration of the meaning of life

Despite the title, this isn’t meant to be deep. I’m not a philosopher or a preacher, and I don’t hold particularly strong beliefs, whether it’s political views, interests that I’m passionate about, or even favorite restaurants and movies. I have thoughts and opinions on individual matters, but I have yet to find the fire that really gets me going in a sustained fashion. Because of this, I’ve found myself fairly aimless in life and have been searching to derive a bit more purpose out of it, or at the very least, understand my existence better.

I, along with everyone else, was born into this world without consent. I’ve been fortunate enough to have a really great life so far, but if I could rewind the clock, perhaps I’d be okay with never being born at all.* But now that I am here and I can’t change past realities (yet), I’d like to make the most of the life I have left to live.

making the most of life

I’ve often fallen into the trap that because life is short, wasting time is bad. I really envy people who don’t waste time, but because I don’t have things I’m really passionate about, it’s hard for me to find the motivation to fill in my time with activities that are productive and/or make me happy. It feels so wrong to seek out a passion in the name of wanting purpose in life - surely, it works the other way for most people?

Life is a marathon, not a sprint, and therefore if you aren’t built for packing your schedule like sardines, it’s okay - doing the best you can is better than forcing yourself to go against your natural inclinations and burning out. Or at least that’s what I tell myself as I write some stuff down that no one will ever read. But maybe finding something that I’m excited about and am really bought into will give me that oomph to get up out of bed 5 minutes earlier, or maybe cut down on the number of Youtube shorts I watch, in particular the ones featuring aimless jumping around in Minecraft superimposed with text from a Reddit post read out loud to me by a robot.

I know I’m going to start a bunch of different projects and hobbies and very quickly lose interest. I know this because I’ve been doing this my whole life, so you could say I’m somewhat of an expert on accomplishing nothing. I’m hoping with this blog I can keep track of all the things I’m doing - at best, it can serve as accountability (or shame - shame works very well on me) to make progress on stuff, and at worst, it’ll be a sad little diary, but at the very least I can see all my incomplete projects in one spot, which may feel like a slightly greater accomplishment in aggregate.

I frequently output low quality work and also never show things if I don’t think it’s good enough, which is the worst combination. I don’t really think I can fix the low quality part, so my motto for this blog will be partial credit is better than no credit - it’s effectively going to serve as documentation for my life, and to set expectations properly, it’s going to be largely unpolished and mostly uninteresting.

That being said, I’m not a huge fan of typical blog layouts that are purely chronological. I will be working on projects in parallel and expect that anyone (including myself) reading this blog would prefer to easily navigate to topics they care about and look at the chronology of one project at a time. Read more about the blog layout here.

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*And the most hypocritical part of this is - I’m really looking forward to having my own kids one day.