Meaning of life etc etc I think the last time i had to answer this question, it was for a college essay prompt and i remember writing maybe three pages on how the meaning of life was to create, or rather to purpose of life was to create. Something about the human itch to make, grow, improve, mess around, figure out, evolve, generate, build, become something /more than/ etc etc. I was young, excited to finally get out into the ((real world))((whatever that meant)) and live out all the potential futures I’d daydreamed of in my bedroom, and managed to impassionately pump out sentences with enthusiastic naive ambitiousness that only my 17 year self could have.

I’m not so sure how i feel about it anymore. I want to believe it, and I do, but only intellectually. Of course all I want to do is make and create and build and think ((or so I keep telling myself because it’s become so intertwined with my identity that I’m scared to find out what would happen if I let go of this despite how much I feel increasingly distanced with this notion)), but it seems somehow more and more idealistic as the years go by - and while I’ve found great joy and meaning in building, I’ve also found so much joy and meaning in so many other things. I guess there’s an angle of creating and building being synonymous with complete and finished products, and the pressure to be able to do that, that over the past year, after having left a job that was the pillar of my identity for so long, I found myself kind of, like, really lost. There was nothing tethering me in any position, no winds in any direction, nothing calling me from anywhere.

I had to start a bit from scratch. I wanted to know what made other people tick, gave them meaning and purpose. I’d always loved knowing what and why and where people were and how they got there. I loved storytelling. I loved understanding contexts. What were the stories people used to anchor themselves from x to y to z to this point in their life. I felt like all of us had these kind of stories (i was born here, i got interested in this, i did this, this happened to me, etc etc) that provided a certain logline/summary to the ‘why are you here’ kind of question. I felt like the only way I could map out and understand mine was to maybe talk to as many people as possible, place myself in this big large web of so many stories and narratives unfolding all together, all at once. What made other people make decisions?

It was basically like building a world in my head, a multi-player world, where so many things were happening in parallel with so many variables of luck and life and chance affecting so many different routes, situation everyone I was speaking to within this framework and then also accepting and knowing that there was so much that I didn’t know, would not see, could never possibly understand in this internal framework of mine. That I’d have to get out there and immerse myself as much as possible in different ways to really see, I guess.

And then kind of maybe seeing people (and myself) beyond these stories and lines and worlds, the things we held so dearly to, and maybe just, looking to the future a bit. What now? All of this, and what now?

I don’t know where this is going, I definitely don’t think I have any big new insights on what the meaning of life is. But I think I have maybe a list of other things that potentially could also be up there, along with my desire to be bob the builder or whatever, and dedicate my life to the pursuit of knowledge and discovery etc etc. I also found/find meaning in

- Going to the beach every day, seeing the sunset and sunrise every day
- Learning how to drive
- Spontaneous travel and missing trains/flights/buses
- Having nothing to do on an afternoon with someone you love spending time with and whatever emerges from that time
- Making music and playing it for someone after lots of disclaimers and them saying they love it
- Cooking with someone and learning how compatible/uncompatible you are to be in a kitchen together
- Talking about food and recipes and food memories with people and inadvertently discovering so much about how they grew up
- Finding a large empty piece of land and screaming
- Hurting so bad that only your melodramatic teenage playlist can understand you and finding solace in it
- Finding someone else to talk about alternative health practices bordering on pseudoscience and sharing obscure articles and websites with each other
- Watching videos of planes taking off and landing from mumbai airport to get over your flight fear
- Actually spending hours learning about planes to get over your flight fear and inadvertently discovering how much appreciation you have for humanity and its ability to create such majestic machines
- Finding old blogspot posts of people travelling to the outskirts of bangalore, doing little treks, and neatly logging it with photos and humorous anecdotes so you too feel like you’re in ramanagara in 2006 with the lads
- The internet, always the internet, and all the weird wonky roads it can lead you down if you let it
- Youtube comments
- Visiting the homes/places where my friends grew up and discovering/knowing more about them and all their layers
- Having someone sing a song for you / make music for you
- ((possibly unethical)) using a mixture of way back machine + specific google search prompts to find obscure/old people/things/etc in a scavenger hunt like process and enjoying every little moment with all the clues and all the ways you can connect the dots to find a website from 2002 that tells you a little more about something that maybe meant something to someone then, and now means something to you now
- Facebook albums!!! Old facebook albums, i found a group of a bunch of older hippies who were posting photos from their travels to india in the 70s/80s/90s with all their stories, seeing your untouched land through a different lens, from a time you maybe would have liked to be a part of (but probably wouldn’t if you’d been born an indian at that time)
- Meeting someone who loves listening to you talk and maybe realising that you have something to say, or at least, someone thinks you have something to say