Meaning

Posted on February 23, 2025

When I was fifteen, I used to call myself “deep” because, while other people my age were obsessing over getting laid after day drinking cheap cider in a cemetery, or watching football and pretending to like it, I would write about the meaning of life and whether or not there was a god.

Turns out I wasn’t deep so much as an incredibly fruity queer kid with a love of drama and a touch of autism. Actually, maybe those two things are the same. But anyway.

Life went on.

As it tends to. I did lots of usual ‘life’ things but still always had at the back of my head the big ‘deep’ questions around the nature of life, the universe around us, and what the point of this whole consciousness thing was. Increasingly it seemed that, if consciousness was intentional, then it was done cruelly. A happy creature is one that has no need or desire to question its environment, surely? I was always struck by that peculiar British phrase that the series Ted Lasso recently re-popularised:

It’s the hope that kills you.

Or, is it? Hope has got me through a lot in life. But the older I get, the more I’m paralysed by wonder yet again. What is the point of all of this?

Are we living in a simulation? If so, I kind of get how hard life can be sometimes. If the world around us is just a way to stress test us, then it does an increasingly great job. Perhaps we’re all just here to test out some edge cases in a great programming experiment. Some cosmic junior engineer is sat as their desk, feeling us increasingly ridiculous scenarios, so that they have something to talk about at the next intergalactic standup meeting.

But what if this isn’t a simulation? What if this is just it? Is this why people are so drawn to religion? The idea that, because life is so unfathomable, it must have a purpose beyond our comprehension? Humans are great at filling in the blanks with far more complex stories than turn out to be real, so maybe that’s why so many believe in higher powers, aliens, simulation theories, etc.

And let’s not even get started on the secret government of lizard people that control the illuminati.

So what’s the point of this post? I don’t think there is one. At least, there’s as much point to this post as there is in anything else in life. It’s here because it is, because this is how I’m feeling and because I wanted to articulate it. Is writing this post part of the simulation? Has it been willed by some godly being? Do I just have a bad case of main-character syndrome?

Fuck knows.

Life’s felt hard recently. I know it has for many, but if I’m being honest all the awful events on the global stage aren’t making me feel as directly numb as the more immediate, more personal things going on in my life. Between illness, loss, and a lack of concrete routine and direction, I find most days harder than I usually do. And on those harder days, I tend to find that I’m prone to getting ‘deep’ like I did when I was fifteen.

Back then I used to think that, if I contemplated hard enough, I’d stumble upon an answer and find a sense of inner peace heretofore unknown. Now? I dunno. Maybe I should go drink some cheap cider in a graveyard, pretend to care about football, and get laid.

Perhaps that’s the nature of the universe after all.