Stay in the Weirdness
It’s Friday, 1:31 PM, and my life is pretty amazing if you look at it from just about any angle except my own. The strange part is that even from my own angle it still looks amazing. It feels amazing, most of the time. But then I take a step back, and I get that same weird emptiness I’ve always carried around.
For a long time I felt like I had some kind of purpose. A point. Like there was a reason I was here that came from somewhere outside of me. And then at some point you wake up and realize there isn’t one. There’s no given purpose, no cosmic incentive, no rule written down somewhere that says this is what you’re for. There’s just you, and your life, and whatever you decide to make of it, day by day.
I won’t call that a hard feeling exactly. It’s more that I can’t get my brain around it, and maybe that’s because there’s nothing to get around. There’s no edge to grip. So the work, as far as I can tell, is getting better at letting things just be what they are. Giving up the need for a reason and letting life be life.
But that’s only half true, and the other half is flatly false. Letting go doesn’t mean you stop wanting to go out and do great things. I’d never put a “well, I’m just not going to try” box around my life. You should always try. Honestly I think that’s the most amazing thing we get to do here: pick something and go absolutely balls to the wall on it.
That’s also exactly what makes life scary. You can pour a day into an idea. A month. A year. Ten years. Fifty. And the truth is it might fail. It might not pan out. It might come to nothing. That’s a terrifying bet to make with the only time you’ve got.
Except the time passes either way. I’m going to wake up one day and be 50 whether I bet big or not. I’m going to wake up and be 90 either way. So the real question, the one waiting at the end, is simpler and harder than “did it work.” It’s: did I actually live this? Did I go out and grab it by the balls and fucking do something?
That’s a brutal question if you’re an ambitious person, and I’m not trying to toot my own horn here even though it probably reads that way. Ambition makes it genuinely hard to chill. Hard to just exist. It’s a catch-22: the same drive that makes me want to seize everything is the thing that won’t let me sit still and let it be. Both are supposed to be true at once.
So that’s the spot I’m in. And wherever it goes from here, I think that’s kind of the beautiful part. We get to see. Life is interesting. It’s beautiful. It’s almost impossible to actually understand, and the best part is that nobody does. Everything I tell myself about it is, on some level, me making up a pile of stories so it feels like I’ve got it figured out. Like life is about me. When the obvious truth is that it’s about everybody. Everyone is out here existing, doing their thing, building their own version of this.
So I sit with the work I’m doing and I notice what it really is: an attempt to give myself a purpose. Through a job, a career, someone to share it with, all of it. And maybe that’s fine. Maybe that’s the whole game.
Mostly I’m just excited. There’s so much you can do, so much I’ll never get to, and I genuinely can’t wait to see what I do with my piece of it. I’ve got big goals and big ambitions, and none of that is going anywhere.
The tough part is just that you have to stay in the weirdness for a little while. Keep the goal. Keep pushing toward it. And also know that life gets funky sometimes, and that’s allowed.
And honestly? That’s damn all right.
Originally published at tomryan.dev.
How this was written
AI helped draft sections of this post, usually code walkthroughs or background material I asked it to summarize. The structure, claims, and judgment are mine. I edited every paragraph.
Licensed CC-BY-4.0.