My Meaning of Life
As far as I can look back, I remember my pursuit of purpose. Driven by a strong rejection and suppression by my social circle (teachers, classmates, parents), I developed a potent defiance to being misunderstood. Coupled with the constant promise of a hero’s victory, a villain’s death, and winning the girl in each and every story I read or watched, there birthed the hero’s complex within me.
I crave the validation like a six year old but I crave in the essence of wanting that type of approval from utterly the entire society, pushing me center wing on policy and negotiable/approachable yet considerate and apologetic in nature — yes that makes me a people-pleaser, whimsically idolizing figures like Barack Obama, Zhao Yun, or the Dark Knight.
Largely my second-generational immigrant nature and social misfit, tempered approach to bullies and insecurity-based exclusionary tactics by my peers, I never outgrew my nerdy side nor my social awkwardness in conversation. Yes, because I was a loner as a kid and not given the chance to have proper friends, I remain awkward especially with unfamiliar social circles, dynamics, and situations. When nerved speechless, I spit the first word I can think of and it is the words my brain is trying to warn me not to say which are offensive, but they pop out first and make it onto my tongue like the honest guy I am.
There in, as I grew to age, all I could think of besides finding my true love and saving the world was this idea of being some significant impact to our world and humanity. Without the connections, the wealth, the status, the genetics, all this seemed fleeting, unrealistic. Moreover, the burst of the grade school bubble — realizing I’m not on the top of anyone’s world — the real world hardly gave a rat’s posterior about me or my ideals to yield me any idealistic access or advantage when I came to know of it.
The funny thing is that question about what are my strengths and weaknesses I get in most of those interviews where the employer actually doesn’t give a damn about me, is surprisingly that very question I could not properly answer.
I’m an honest person. I work hard.
But do I? Am I honest about working hard?
I work hard for a cause. But a man without a cause is a ship without its sail. It can be the Bluenose schooner but it ain’t winning any races.
So there we are floating on the subway train in the rat’s race of 9–5 cause I’m lucky not to live in Asia and work 9–9 or NYC where they work and live virtually synonymous with time 12 to 12 to 12 endlessly cycling away like the turners of the laundromat they depend on. Yes, I start to think my life is meaningless. That is only natural!
Each time I take vacation, I feel guilty. Like I need to give myself permission to breathe most of all. Don’t worry, I’m no closer to the meaning of life, but at least I wasted enough time in the office building or locked down in my own rental apartment that I can now lounge on an expensive getaway spot where the whole ecosystem is designed to suck the coins out of me— the same ones I hardly gave a breeches about earning — oh boy I’d better keep this trip short or I might need to become that digital nomad fantasy, my credit card cries about the FOREX or should I say it hardly cries about the FOREX, makes the tap feel pain-free and rewarding in some way.
Slow down.
Stop working with toxic people.
Stop keeping toxic friends.
Choose myself.
Sure. I did all that.
But the planet continues to warm. Litterers still litter. Oil is still spilt. Oligarchies still have pieces on the board. And I won’t be the next President. Literally I changed nothing, and I’m already starting to ache when I get up from bed. I take longer trips in the bathroom. I know I am aging away. (Quiet you 40+ people, I know I still have long life to go, even still, acceptance of aging is a motivator for positive change)
Yet some groups of seventy year olds still control all the pieces on the board and they’ll be dead sooner than the rest of us — passing power along the legal fine lines of nepotism, yet we still have no direct control.
Why?
Well, sometimes that complaint is meaningless, cause its just my capacity to complain because I can and there’s no consequences. It is easier to question the society than to actually provide society with answers. Even harder to implement it, that’s why we complain and do nothing.
I think, thyself ought to be rectified afore I go short-circuit anything else. Those values I hold onto until I’m 70 will likely show a path to someone in my generation to make those changes we are already seeking today. But we must fight for them or our values will perish before we go. That at least explains the 70 year old’s willingness to do and stay in power at corporate or government, cause they rather hold up the fragile but rightful ways, its better than questioning life, it’s better than retiring, it’s better than dying having lost control.
But wait, is that not the point?
That opportunity to impact the world on a bigger scale, it is an earned opportunity. Peers and privileges are won and earned through years of cumulative experience and decisions. Yes, an imperfect society will not always yield the rightful winners.
Yet, I try. That’s the point.
The meaning of life, as I evaluate it, is the degree in which I pursue the happy agenda. I work hard on what I need to do in order to do things to make me happy. It’s to stop waiting for happiness to arrive. It comes when I choose it.
It comes with little things. I don’t look too far in advance for impact and ambition. If I want to change the world, I start by accepting my reality and being happy with what I have. And doing my part no matter how small it is and keep that up until the next opportunity comes along.
To live life in inches rather than miles ahead. I want to stop climate change.
Last generation was about escaping poverty, building international prosperity together. Bringing countries further along in development so everybody wins.
The generation before that, survive World War II, survive colonialism, survive poverty.
This generation, survive technological takeover, survive the old patriarchal that won’t let go, survive capitalism as it rears it ugly side where individuals think themselves the solvers of world’s problems when it is really institutions that have fallen astray and far behind the tech boom. And in the endgame of creative destruction and saturated markets lie stale corruption and stagnate youthful over consumerism and blame-train — aka we blame younger people for being lazy when in fact the older folks are in the damn way! aka the aka there’s not much room left for innovation when all the gaps are already addressed and now our society pushes itself away from collective funding and moving towards individual heroics, this runs counter to a productive conversation of sharing and cooperating together to get over the next great mountain. Sure, private enterprise is purposeful, invigorating, and liberating in its own right — a lot is done when you let people motivate themselves. But private prosperity comes only when markets are undersaturated and glory is enough to go around. There’s only scraps left, we need public funding to find new oceans to swim in.
This generation is about the slow grind to change our gears towards green technology, conservation of nature and what we have left, better use of our natural resources, alternatives to pollution, preventing water wars. And my role is not to say I want to be the [Martin Luther] King [Jr] of that. My role is to say I am going to choose my own happiness and advocate for the right values. I will vote that way. I will work that way. I will live that way. I will love that way.
And I am certainly not going to get ahead of myself, compromise my present day happiness (being all upset about not making a difference that is hindering my ability to be happy in the moment to function properly in the moment). And I won’t compromise myself because I must be there in the end when I’m old when suddenly just maybe, the reason for my life is explained.
Today, coming home from British Columbia, I think I get it now. I no longer sulk in depression about my unfulfilled talents to solve global climate change amid white supremacy, income inequality, opportunity inequality, and a shit ton of problems that I know what is better but if I were given the keys today, I would fail to muster the troops in the right direction.
Sharpen that sword.
Soften that belly.
Keep myself happy.
Wait.
When it is time. Do the right thing.
When it is not time. Just live. Stretch, lift some weights, run a mile, hug the dog, kiss my partner, and laugh with my friends.
Cause last generation was about war and poverty. This generation is about not falling back to that while solving more complex problems and steering the ship away from climate disaster. The bitching and complaining I do is literally a misguided meaningless fight for nothing. I will change nothing.
Am I giving up?
No.
I am just being realistic about what I can do. And then accepting myself for who I am. And then from here, where can I go?
The inertia of that is the opportunity cost I am either blind to, or too scared to act on it.
For the rest, I need to be happy with the little victories in life that give me the life I have now. I am fortunate to be Canadian, fortunate to be a homeowner, fortunate to be taken (not single — only because that’s what I want, single is fine if that’s what others want). I like my life.
And I’ll fight for it. And I’ll fight for better world in the space I take up, in the narrative I draw around me.
My meaning of life is writing itself each and every day. If I sit around questioning it, it blocks me mentally from pursuing my life. So the great answer questions itself with each sunrise and answers itself with each sunset.
Let me not go asking what the question is. I am not wasting my life if I am living a good life. When at least I lived the good life and I am old, I know my meaning of life could span an encyclopedia. By then, if I am not a Barack Obama or a Wayne Gretzky, at least I was not a Vladimir Putin or a Donald Trump. I was true to myself and my life. And I appreciated what Life is for what Life was, and not what Life is for what Life will be or was before.
What if I never swing (if I never risk my life fully for climate change), and what if no one swings for the fence and no home run is ever hit? Well…then life was meaningless anyway. I do not believe life is meaningless. I believe life is meaningful and I will live my life that way, swinging whenever I see a ball coming. And when there’s no ball coming, I’m not sulking that I get no balls to swing at and I’m not swinging repeatedly at empty air in some valiant self-sacrificial effort to be the home run hero.
Another way of looking at it. If I was Obama today, and I read his novel and saw his mindset. To be honest, even in the highest chair of democracy, I cannot move heaven and earth. I can’t singlehandedly build solar panels, nuclear fusion plants, save the sharks and bears, save the bees, stop littering from ever happening again, invent clean fish farms and end the emission of beef production, clean all the rivers and lakes, and refreeze the polar caps. So why set that expectation upon myself. Why despair over a problem I have no current control in solving?
And if by the end of my life I could change but one of those things, it was a life worth giving. But all in time, as long as someone in my lifetime, does it. It would be a miracle to be grateful for and a privilege to partake in. To be celebrated, not to be envied.
