meaning and purpose

2025-10-09

The reason I started to work out was not because of getting more girls or looking better or even being more healthy. Honestly, they were all factors but it was this single quote that changed my entire outlook on my life and what I should do with it:

"It is a shame for a man to grow old without seeing the beauty and strength of which his body is capable" - Socrates

This quote changed my perspective in such a way that I was more aware of being blessed with this one life and that I would squander the opportunity that I was given if I didn't take action. What I did not realise was that this concept could be expanded and applied to parts of life other than just physical health and well-being.

Similarly, I started learning Japanese because I thought it was cool if I did know the language. I've had prior interest in learning it in the past because I was engrossed with anime and manga at the time, but it never went beyond simple curiosity. This changed when I decided to commit to learning Japanese just to see how far I could get with consistent effort applied to something I was mildly interested in. Two years on, I can say that I'm pretty happy with the results so far.

However, at some point I lost sight of my original motivation and started to build habits not because I wanted to do them, but because I thought they were the "right" thing to do. I lost the forest for the trees and didn't consider the reasons for why I was pursuing these habits in the first place. This eventually led to feelings of inadequacy, a sense of purposelessness, and burnout.

I recently watched a podcast episode¹ from "The Diary of a CEO" in which the participants were talking about purpose and meaning and how a person would find it in a time where more and more people are struggling with purpose and mental health.

One of the participants, Dr K, proposed a way to find purpose in your life by changing your attitude towards life and minimising your ego as much as possible². What I found particularly useful was this concept of "ego death", which is described as a "complete loss of subjective self-identity".

The participants also brought up the story of Sisyphus, in which Sisyphus, as a protest to the gods decided to be happy. Even if the action he took of pushing the boulder up the hill was meaningless in the end. Similar to Sisyphus, everything in our lives will eventually be swept up with death and time, so the only option is for us to change our attitude to this inevitability and choose to be happy without ego.

From my perspective, this doesn't mean you should stop doing anything and be satisfied with your current circumstances. But rather you should make choices about what actions to take without worrying about why you're doing it or what larger purpose there is to doing it. Life is just one big ride we're all on and there is no point of building something that outlasts us, because death will eventually consume everything. In a sense, we have no choice but to become content with our circumstances and do things for the sake of doing them.

#life #philosophy #purpose