I suspect that if you keep peeling away the layers here, you may come to find that this, in the end, is a struggle to find meaning. It is the same struggle that

I suspect that if you keep peeling away the layers here, you may come to find that this, in the end, is a struggle to find meaning. It is the same struggle that haunts many: we want to matter. How can we matter? We then grasp the idea that if only we could climb the mountain and reach the pinnacle of human achievement - if we could change the world - well then surely we would have mattered. Well, I have news. If you were to radically transform the world, if your work surpasses any of our industry "titans" and creates the foundation of a utopia to last for thousands of years, if you are adored around the world by everyone alive young and old and captured in the annals of history... congratulations, you have affected the lives of approximately zero of the beings that have lived or have yet to live. And you will still die. And they will still die. And in time everything you have wrought will be destroyed. And you will be utterly forgotten. And all of humanity's history will disappear from knowledge. And the earth will be devoured by the sun. Inevitably. So it goes. It is irrationally tilting at a windmill to think that the degree of your impact in this life has anything to do with the meaningfulness of your existence. The takeaway here is that you are no less important and your life is no less meaningful than any mogul or genius that you can think of. It is reasonable to think that nothing that you or they do will ever matter. Or even can. But that's ok; life is still beautiful. And if you have others in your life, you matter to them incomparably more than any of those geniuses ever could. I think if you look, you can find meaning there. It's not settling, it's understanding the reality of things. You don't need to change the world to matter; you can just be you.