Dear PiePie,
At some point in your life, you will wonder, what is the meaning of life. Depending on your religious belief and life experiences, this answer might differ. If you have a belief system that ascribe certain meanings to life and potentially afterlife, that’s good. There will probably be guiding principles that you are living your life by, and by and large, those guiding principles tend to make you a “good” person, whatever that may mean.
What I’m writing here might be helpful only if you’re a little lost. Perhaps you have not yet been fully convinced by one belief system or another. Thus, life appears a little meaningless. Everyone just grows old and die, doesn’t it seem? If that’s the case, why do we have to go through everything in between? The struggles of studying. The toil and labour of working. The heartbreaks and anguish.
The simplest answer, perhaps, is that life doesn’t have a meaning. It doesn’t owe you a meaning, and it need not have one. And maybe, even in the absence of a meaning, life can still be meaningful.
I’ve found that it can be helpful to simultaneously hold two lenses when going through life – one that’s skewed towards the short-term, and one that encompasses the really long-term. And it’s important that we toggle between the two frequently enough because dwelling too long in one or the other might make you a little myopic.
In the short-term, we all have goals and objectives that we are striving towards, whether that is saving for a trip, or getting a degree with certain honors, or launching a new personal project. Those are good, and those tend to be the fuel that drives us to wake up every morning ready to embark on a new adventure. And most people are in this “hustle” state of mind, primarily because society demands of it. But the downsides of this is also quite apparent.
It’s easy to get burnt out chasing illusions, and at the end of the chase, even if you got what you wanted, you might end up feeling empty. And the emptiness that comes after finally achieving something you’ve dreamt about for a long time can cause you to wonder what all the effort and pain was for. And that is why it’s important to occasionally take a step back, think about life in its entirety, and remember that life is a journey.
When we put on the long-term lens, you’ll tend to find that neither “failures” nor “successes” matter as much as you think they do in the short-term. It is why, while we should celebrate successes, we should not get ahead of ourselves. Life has a way of humbling you. At the same time, there’s no need to get too down on the perceived failures. It’ll come to pass, just as the perceived successes do. I say this not to trivialise life, but to empower you.
The long term lens should hopefully make you unafraid to try for things, because many common reasons for not trying – doubts of your own ability or the potential embarrassment of failure – fall away in the grand scheme of life. Looking at life in its entirety, I have found, is also incredibly helpful to help you stay true to what matters to you. When you’re at a decision crossroads, sometimes it’s good to wonder, “when I’m on my deathbed, which decision would my dying self rather have chosen?” The decision could be about doing “what’s right” as opposed to “what’s easy” in pursuit of your short-term goal. Or it could be about relationships, or what to study etc. Regardless, it is helpful not to be trapped in the short-term when making those decisions.
But of course, you should not dwell indefinitely in this mode. The long-term lens is a state of mind that you should access regularly, but sparingly. Going down the spiral of “nothing really matters” tends to end up in a fatalistic state where you let life happen to you, as opposed to putting in the effort for anything. And then you’ve missed out on living life at all.
The short-term lens drives you to experience life to the fullest, whether it’s the toil of pulling 4am nights or the disappointment of experiencing a setback. (You’ll look back most fondly at these memories) The long-term lens reminds you that the process is what truly matter, regardless of how well or poorly you do, compared to the short-term goals you’ve set for yourself. Both lenses are important. When the reward of any action is the action itself, you will appreciate life more fully.
You will walk along the path of life with eyes wandering side to side, taking in the view and wandering down broken side-paths, as opposed to just looking for the next signpost on the main road. I hope you treasure the moments.
Love, Dad