What's the point?
Finding meaning in times of existential dread
Sometimes you feel like you are thinking too deeply about it all.
The same questions pop up such as: ‘Why am I doing this?’, ‘What’s the point? Are the ‘benefits’ worth it?’, ‘What’s the end goal? And when I get there will I be happy?’
In a time of an overabundance of choice and possibility, where things achievable for most human beings are being made easier and lazier by the day, it is easy to feel this sensation of meaninglessness.
Complacency creeps in when activities, challenges and quests just don’t require enough effort.
When the going gets tough, it’s painful, but when not tough enough, aimless.
For those who tend to overthink and overanalyse, this feeling of existential dread happens more often. Our minds are susceptible to this sinking feeling when we think too far ahead or we try to plan our lives too perfectly.
In a world where corporations, culture and individuals alike are all wrestling for our attention, our needs can be fulfilled all too easily.
The notion that ‘people just aren’t proud of their profession anymore’ has truth to it, but more importantly people no longer have as much of a need to be proud of who they are and what they do.
The world seems so well-supplied and saturated that we as cogs in society’s machine can easily fall into the trap of feeling surplus to requirements and sitting back and becoming observers.
Building an internal sense of accomplishment, resilience and purpose alone gets increasingly difficult as the cost for not doing so becomes less and less. Most of the time you have the choice to live life on autopilot, without much repercussion.
Humanity feels accomplished in the material sense so much nowadays to the point that so many lose sight of the human side, with emotion and happiness so often pushed to the side in favour of logical ‘progress’.
We are obliged to walk the path expected of us in order to contribute to society rather than walk the path meant for us.
This is so deeply engrained in our society, culture and now in our minds that it is quite hard now to fathom a world that isn’t like this.
Hope remains, though, and it lives in the individual.
Humanity has collectively done a pretty good job at ‘optimising’ the life experience, at the cost of optimising each of ourselves. Happiness, community, family and mental clarity are all suffering as a result of our striving for optimisation. Optimising algorithms, processes and systems are put ahead of taking care of the mind. A shift in mindset to improving oneself turns this around.
This responsibility doesn’t lie with governmental structures or leaders, but instead with you; the human being. Establish what personal growth means to you and consecrate life itself to the pursuit of that rather than anything else.
We search for the ‘point’ of life externally in a collectively curated melting pot of millions of ideas when it has to lie within.
A key moulded from the sum of all locks cannot open every door.
Your uniqueness is a positive because you always stand out, but also means that the instruction manual is only true to you.