Philosophically, Life’s Actually Meaningless — But There’s A Deeper Hidden Meaning…
A meaning so liberating, positive, and profound that the question of meaning itself might vanish — as it did for me

Forget “we all die one day”, we’re all constantly dying.
Every second, ~3.8 million cells perish in our body. That’s 330 billion cells per day. It’s our body’s thankless yet tireless regeneration that keeps us “alive” — until it can.
Time doesn’t spare our ideas of “legacy” either…
Children? As mortal as us. LLCs? You’ll likely outlast them. Biographies? Pop culture fame? Memorials? Patents? Inventions? Gone with societal collapse — likely in a few centuries. Carter’s Doomsday argument (DA) predicts humanity itself will soon go extinct! As the Buddha declared, “Sabbe saṅkhārā aniccā”— all phenomena are impermanent.
As if time wasn’t cruel enough, space mocks us further.

The cosmos is 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 times our size.
That’s the observable universe. The unobservable is at least 250 times larger, if not infinite. Watch The Cosmic Eye to realize just how incomprehensible these magnitudes are. Celebrated physicist Stephen Hawking summed it up blithely,
“We are just an advanced breed of monkeys on a minor planet of a very average star.”
Flip to the micro-scale, and “we” are illusions ourselves — masses of cells branding themselves Aarav, Kathy, and Rahmat — hoarding masses of atoms as “possessions” — and birthing new cellular masses to keep the cycle alive.
At quantum levels, objective reality itself begins dissolving. Subjectivity? Beauty? Be it human, art, or architecture?
Under(neath) the skin, color, and plaster — it’s all blood, guts, rough strokes, and coarse concrete. As some wise soul said, “Beauty is 1/6th of an inch deep.”
Worse still? Time and space don’t spare even this surface-level beauty:
- Fast-forward decades and centuries — you get rotting corpses and dilapidated churches.
- Zoom in, and even the best of “beauty” will reveal blemishes, bumps, and coarse defects.


The Starry Night by Van Gogh vs the same Zoomed-In (Wikimedia Commons)
Time or space, micro or macro, subjective or objective — where’s the meaning in anything?
For years, I’ve struggled with this question—seeking (in vain) answers in math, science, psychology, philosophy, history, epistemology, and metaphysics…
Only to realize the question itself was wrong — which unlocked a meaning deeper than I could ever imagine.