01-30-2026

the meaning of (my) life

my submission for the indieweb carnival of january 2026

i've given some thought into the idea of death. it's inevitable after all. because of death, every experience in life will end, its just a matter of when. if thats the case, what does it all mean?

in high school i was pretty depressed about the notion of dying. since i wasn't very religious then, i found it difficult to parse out exactly what the hell i was supposed to be doing in the time between birth and death. combine that with teenage hormones and you've got yourself a great time.

so i searched for some kind of answer. i read the gay science by nietzsche, which provided some insight into dealing with life without a god that provides inherent meaning. if i'm being honest with myself, though, i probably wasn't ready to read it yet and supplemented a lot of ideas by having conversations with friends and watching youtube videos about it. i stumbled on the idea of optimistic nihilism, which, in retrospect, seems to be what nietzsche was all about. the idea is essentially "life has no meaning, so meaning can be created for it." life itself is about the pursuit of meaning. i didn't get it yet i guess. i found it difficult to assign my own meaning to my life, so i searched for it in other people.

after a long while of doing that, i realized that i don't feel satisfied because i dont get to be me. if i define myself through the desires of others, i become my own perception of what those people want me to be (not even actually what they would want me to be, but thats irrelevant in this case). being true to oneself is something i'm honestly still struggling with today. its easy to get caught up in people-pleasing behaviors because i think itll make people like me, but i know now that my life's meaning is not that.

as long as i've lived so far (not even a quarter century), ive started to realize that many things are about knowing what you don't want more than what you do want. especially for something as nebulous as life's meaning, satisfying art, or a good adventure, its borderline impossible to genuinely know exactly what you want. some people may appear to be blessed with knowing what their purpose is, some people may seem like a mess in that regard, but we all end life the same way: by dying.

there is a saying that was introduced to me by V.H. Bavaldi: what you are, i once was; and what i am, you surely will become. it's an epitatph that is somewhat commonly seen and, for me, it's a favorite memento mori. we should remember that we must die. for this death forces us to trade off our experiences on a grand scale. that can be stressful, but if the alternative is not to die ever, i would take the fleeting experiences that befall us mortals rather than every experience forever.

looking through a window can be much more exciting than seeing the entire earth at once in perfect detail, since so much more is left to our imagination. our curiosity makes us wonder what life was like before us, what life will be like after us, and what we can do to make our lives better now. this is our humanity showing, which, for us humans, i think is worthwhile to entertain.

what do you want to be said at your funeral?

i think this is a particularly interesting question to bring up because it provides some semblance of an "end goal" for life. for the longest time, my "end goal" has been to try leaving the world in a better place than i found it, to affect those around me deeply enough that they miss me; miss me not as a status indicator for myself, but as an indicator of exactly how i may have improved their lives by being around. i've dealt with feelings of not thinking i should be around before. i've changed a bit since then (though the undercurrent sometimes persists). i now actively try to make my life worthwhile. i attempt to make others' lives better by being myself; allowing myself to be in a position that affects the right people while allowing me to be as i am.

not really answering the question, but i suppose i'd want people to be honest about how i affected them. i don't want my memory to be sugarcoated, though i know that will probably happen. i am a flawed person, we are all flawed people somehow. i want to be remembered for who i really was, not for who i tried to be.

that's why i'd want that epitaph. a reminder to my grave's visitor that i was once a flawed person with an inner experience, just like them; that they will one day be just like me: six feet underground. a reminder to the visitor to get busy living, or get busy dying.