If Life Feels Pointless Remember Why It Matters
Why you should believe in what you do, no matter how small it may seem.
Your life and actions matter. It’s easy to think that they don’t. After all, you are 1 out of 7 billion people on a planet that rotates 1 out of 200 billion trillion stars.
It’s easy to feel small. It’s easy to fall into an existential trap where you think that nothing you do matters.
It is quite the opposite. Everything you do does matter. Every action that you do and don’t do makes a small difference.
Imagine if life did not exist in the universe. The entire universe would be pre-calculated to some extent. All matter and objects would fall into the exact place they were supposed to.
Then a miracle happened, life.
Life gave birth to something the universe had never happened before, randomness. Humans shot the first satellites into space—the first objects in our solar system to randomly be projected out. Someday, we may have the capability to deflect asteroids from our planet, defeating the pre-calculated notion that the universe previously had.
One Person Can Change The World
Imagine if you are a professor at a college and you notice that someone sitting in your classes is not enrolled in the university. You don’t know what decision to make about this person. Do you kick them out of the class because they aren’t paying to go to the university or do you let them sit in because it doesn’t matter? After all, they’re not going to get credit for this course anyway. This person enjoys learning.
You decide to let the student stay and sit in on that class. Years later you find out that the person that was sitting in your class was Steve Jobs.
We all make decisions in our day-to-day lives big and small. Imagine if that professor kicked Steve Jobs out of the class. How would that have changed his life trajectory? Maybe it would have been a blip and he still would have become who we know of today. Maybe it would have shifted his life in a different direction.
When people support each other and help each other rise, we all rise together. When others kick others down, all that’s left is someone lonely at the top.
I think one of the saddest things you can see is when you see someone who is 80 years old and they are embezzling money so they can make their net worth go from $200 million to $300 million. What kind of game are you playing? Even if you live another 10 years that’s only about 520 weeks left of your life. Are you going to spend the final days of your life making sure that other people are more miserable?
What You Do And Don’t Do Both Matters
If you are at home sitting on the couch watching a show, you might not think that moments like that matter but they do. They matter because you are not doing something else.
Many of us aimlessly go through life without an intention of why we are doing something. It’s easy to get into a routine and think that relaxing for an hour doesn’t matter when in fact, you could be trying to make your life better. You could try to workout. If you are intentional about the moment that could be that you are trying to relax with a loved one and have some quality time together. That matters.
Those nights you blow off going to hang out with your friends matters as well. If you use that time to do nothing, I see that as a waste. If you only see your friends once every few weeks or even once a week, that’s about 50 interactions you will have with them in a year. Take that even further if you see them for 3 hours then that’s about 150 hours a year that you see your friends.
If Everyone In Your Position Stopped Working, The World Would Stop
Imagine the role you have in your current workplace. It’s easy to think that if you don’t have a glamorous job it doesn’t matter. Now imagine that if everyone who works in your position stopped working tomorrow. What would happen? It would probably be economic chaos. There are no essential and non-essential workers. Every job is essential. Some jobs are overstaffed, that's for sure but if there were zero people then that would create chaos.
Believe In Your Work
I’m a firm believer that everyone needs to know what they believe in. Whether you like it or not, you have to believe in something. Believing in nothing is still believing in something.
We all live short lives. We probably will never truly see the impact that we had on the world. This is why everything you should do should be for the action itself and not for the fruits of the labor.
You probably will never get the credit you deserve in your life and that’s okay. Work towards something bigger than that. Work towards making the world a better place by making everything around you a better place. Even if the rest of the world is shit, at least the little area that you’ve built is something beautiful. That beauty can spread and create something even bigger than you ever could imagine.
Do you still feel like what you do doesn’t matter? That’s why I built a worksheet to help you discover your principles. Check it out here and start building out the life you imagined.
