A Working Theory of My Life

This year has not been easy for me. Starting early this year, I kept wondering what the actual meaning of my life is.

If you ask my friends, they would probably say I’m generally a happy person. And I think that’s true. For a long time, I unconsciously chased happiness. I wanted to collect beautiful moments, stay in them, and feel that kind of joy as much as possible.

But I started to notice that even in my happiest moments, there was always a quiet sadness underneath. While laughing with my best friend or sharing a beautiful evening together, a small part of me was already grieving the fact that the moment would soon be over. The happier I felt, the more painful it became, because I knew I would miss it so much later. After feeling this sadness so many times, I started to wonder: what’s the point of feeling happy in the first place, if I know it will end soon and I’ll feel so sad missing it afterward? So I stopped believing that my life goal should simply be “to be happy.”

Once I gave up chasing happiness as my life goal, I started wondering what the actual meaning of my life — and of those good moments — really was.

So first, at least I know this: I have to define the meaning of my own life. No one cares more about my life than I do. If I try to find meaning only through other people, external achievements, or the expectations of the world, it will never truly belong to me, and I will never feel genuinely happy. Life doesn’t come with a predefined meaning. We create meaning through the way we choose to live. Okay, if you agree with me, let’s move on.

So if I have to define my own purpose, I think I would say: I want to live my life to the fullest (here I recommend the song Vivir Mi Vida). I want to be free enough to explore the world with an open heart. To me, freedom doesn’t mean having no responsibilities or living without difficulties. It means being able to experience the world fully without being constantly limited by my own fears, insecurities, and boundaries. Only then can I truly see the world as it is and decide what I genuinely want — and don’t want — in my life. I’ve seen many limitations within myself, mostly worries and fears, that keep me from even stepping into certain parts of life. So I want to slowly unlock those parts of myself. I want to become someone brave enough to experience more, connect more deeply, and embrace more possibilities.

If that is my goal, then maybe good moments exist to free me from my limitations and make me know more about myself. I like to think of people as machine learning models, and our experiences as the training data that shapes us. Everything we experience becomes part of us. We carry our past wounds, our trauma, and the painful things that happened to us. But we also carry our happiness, our friendships, our love, our inspirations.

Looking back, I realize that many of the happiest moments in my life did exactly that. I remember how going to dance socials filled me with joy and gradually strengthened my resolve to make dancing a lifelong part of my life. I rememeber talking to my friends about some bad experience from when I was younger and getting healed from her kind and powerful words. Some experiences are just as valuable for what they rule out — I tried new sports and discovered, without much grief, that some simply weren’t mine to keep. So, a conversation ends, a vocation with friends ends, a relationship ends, childhood ends, but endings don’t erase them. Their value is that after experiencing them, I always become someone slightly different. I become more free, more courageous, more connected to my friends and I know more about myself. The moment disappears, but the transformation remains as the weight of my model.

Through all these years of observing myself, I’ve realized that I truly love the feeling of growing: being inspired, or seeing the world from a different perspective. That feeling of something inside me expanding feels incredibly meaningful. So when I finally reached the conclusion that growth might be the theme of my life, it somehow made a lot of sense.

But I also know this is only one definition of life. People are so different, and everyone has a different answer. People are motivated by love, family, creation, helping others or achievement, etc. So sometimes, when I’m sitting in the lab and start spacing out, I wonder what is the motivation behind everyone around me? What keeps my labmates, my friends, all these people, showing up every day? But it feels strange to ask someone directly, “Hey, what’s the meaning of your life?” (lol) So maybe I’ll keep wondering quietly :)

I’m pretty happy my logic is complete here.

Again, I hope you have a good day, or a good night.