It’s Fine to Waste Your Life Away - English Version

Written by Mars

In an era where we constantly hear the mantra “find yourself and chase your dreams”, the title of this post might seem very bold. I am a believer in the fact that every reward worth having comes at the cost of labor. However, today I want to provide a perspective you might not agree with—and truthfully, I’m not even sure I do—but I suggest that you give it a chance. While browsing through my school library one evening in search of a new perspective, I stumbled across Jikisai Minami’s It’s Okay Not to Look for the Meaning of Life, and it inspired me to write this for you. 

People often proclaim that we must find, tend to, or even take care of some self—a figure that is somehow intertwined with our lives—but what is this self? Is it your face? Well, it can’t be, because your face at birth is in all likelihood nothing like your face now. Could it be the cells that constitute your body? It can’t be, for your body undergoes constant mitosis with the number of cells in you growing exponentially.

The Self

Minami argues that there are only two cornerstones from which we can establish this self. Primarily, your memory establishes it. If, for instance, you woke up with not a single memory of the events along the course of your life that have led to the very moment you read this, the self you talk about no longer exists. Furthermore, recognition from others also establishes this illusory self. If everyone you’ve ever known and loved forgot everything that they associate with you today, then are you really the same self you’ve posited all this time?

The self is actually one of the most imperative concepts in sociology. George Herbert Mead—a 19th-century American philosopher and sociologist—made a renowned distinction not between you and I (wink), but between ‘I’ and ‘me’. ‘I’ is the part of you that acts in the moment—it’s spontaneous and can’t really be observed while it’s happening. For example, when you do something (like tell a joke), that’s your ‘I’ in action. While you’re telling the joke, it doesn’t really sit at the forefront of your mind, but, perhaps, later you might replay the moment and think about what you said and how people reacted: this is the ‘me’ taking over, configuring itself with its surroundings.

Observably, this aligns powerfully with Minami’s view that the self is not intrinsic but built from memory. It raises an unsettling but fascinating question: if the self is socially and mentally constructed, then can’t it be undone just as easily? For some, this fact may inspire fear; for others, it may offer a form of liberation, as they realize that there is nothing really wrong with changing who you think you ought to be.

Is life meaningless?

How can we say life has meaning if we were born by chance? You didn’t choose your genetic traits, nor did you choose the two people you call your parents. Then, a rational part of me would say that life is something borrowed—something given and not chosen. If so, how can we claim that it carries intrinsic meaning? It seems eerie to assign purpose to something that began as a statistical outcome. That’s like saying if one day the forces of Mother Earth decided to drop snow on Jakarta, then it has some meaning—when really it is just another symptom of extreme climate change.

What we believe we “should” do in life isn’t necessarily meaningful but, rather, an illusion. Yet, I wouldn’t deny that such illusions are necessary, for deciding which illusion you choose to live by is deciding what you ‘should’ do. When we come to terms with the fact that this sense of purpose is a chosen illusion, we are more ready for moments when life decides to go south. Therefore, if you never achieve your supposed ‘should’, do not worry. While society might label that a ‘wasted’ life, you know better: you’re nothing more than a self who happened to greet Earth with your existence and live by an illusion.

References

Minami, J. (2024). IT’S OKAY NOT TO LOOK FOR THE MEANING OF LIFE: A Zen Monk’s Guide to Living Stress-Free One Day at a Time. Tuttle.

George Herbert Mead: Taking the role of the other | EBSCO. (n.d.). EBSCO Information Services, Inc. | www.ebsco.com. https://www.ebsco.com/research-starters/social-sciences-and-humanities/george-herbert-mead-taking-role-other