Before we begin, a confession.
I’ve been sitting on this essay for a while. Not because it was difficult to write. The words came surprisingly easily once I started. What took time was deciding whether I was willing to publish it at all.
Most of what I write lives in safer territory. Work. Technology. Investing. Things that can be debated, measured, and occasionally proven wrong. This is different. This is what happens when the conversation turns inward.
The internet rewards certainty. It rewards confidence. It rewards people who sound like they have answers. This essay contains almost none. What follows is a story about a question that started with selfies and somehow ended with mortality, meaning, God, philosophy, and the uncomfortable realization that I may have spent much of my life searching for understanding while calling it something else.
I’m not writing this because I’ve arrived at a conclusion. Quite the opposite. I’m writing it because I haven’t. And because over the last few days I discovered that some of the smartest people who have ever lived didn’t arrive at one either. Maybe that’s disappointing. Maybe it’s comforting. I’m still not sure.
What I do know is that this is probably the most vulnerable thing I’ve put out on the internet. Which is precisely why it sat in drafts for so long.
A few nights ago, slightly unhappy, slightly inebriated, and increasingly annoyed by a group of people attempting to take selfies in what seemed like the most inconvenient locations imaginable, I found myself asking a surprisingly stupid question.
Why do people take selfies?
Not in a judgmental sense, at least not initially. The annoyance came first. One person needed a better angle. Another appeared determined to document their existence from every conceivable perspective before allowing the rest of us to continue with our evening. At some point, irritation gave way to curiosity. Why are we like this? Why does standing in front of a mountain, turning a camera around, and capturing evidence of our own presence feel so important?
The extrovert’s solution would have been to ask the people taking the selfies. The introvert in me turned to ChatGPT.
The answer was surprisingly thoughtful. Selfies, it suggested, aren’t really about photography. They’re about memory. Identity. Belonging. Tiny declarations that say:
I was here.
I existed.
I belonged to this moment.
There was also a joke about ancient tribal instincts finally getting WiFi. I laughed. Then I made the mistake of continuing to think about it, which, in retrospect, has been responsible for most of my philosophical problems.
Because beneath every attempt to preserve a memory lies a more uncomfortable question. Why are we so desperate to preserve anything at all? Why does being forgotten bother us? Why do we care whether anyone remembers that we were here?
The deeper I followed that thread, the less it seemed to be about selfies. It was about time.
I’ve never been entirely comfortable with time. Not in the poetic sense. Not in the “life is short, cherish every moment” sense. More in the sense that I’ve never understood how everyone manages to ignore how strange the arrangement is. Everything disappears. Not eventually. Constantly.
The person I was ten years ago is gone. The person I was five years ago is gone. Entire chapters of my life now exist only as memory. Parents age. Friends move away. Familiar places vanish. Even on the best days there is a faint awareness that something is always slipping through your fingers.
The process is so ordinary that we rarely stop to examine it. We wake up. We go to work. We pay our bills. We answer emails. We make plans for next year. All while participating in a continuous process of loss that never pauses and never asks permission.
The strange thing is that these thoughts weren’t arriving during some period of crisis. Life is good. Objectively, very good. I have a career I’m proud of. A wife I adore. Financial security. Good health. Good friends. More opportunities than I ever expected to have. Which made the feeling harder to understand. The problem wasn’t unhappiness. It was the growing suspicion that happiness and understanding might be entirely different pursuits.
At some point I started wondering whether other people had felt this way. Surely I wasn’t the first person to begin with selfies and somehow end up staring into the abyss. So I kept asking questions.
What followed became one of the stranger intellectual journeys I’ve had in years. I wasn’t really studying philosophy. I was looking for witnesses, people who had stood at the edge of the same canyon and written down what they saw.
Camus was there. Nietzsche was there. Simone Weil was there. The Stoics had apparently set up camp centuries earlier. What surprised me wasn’t how different they were. It was how often they seemed to be staring at the same thing.
The silence.
Human beings have spent thousands of years asking the same questions. Why are we here? Why do we suffer? Why does consciousness exist at all? What happens when we die? And perhaps the most unsettling realization of adulthood is discovering that nobody is standing at the front of the classroom with the answer key.
As children there is always someone to ask. Parents. Teachers. Experts. Eventually you arrive at the larger questions and discover that humanity itself is still confused. We’ve simply become more sophisticated in the ways we express that confusion.
The thing that frightened me wasn’t death. Death is at least an event. What unsettled me was the possibility that the universe and humanity are engaged in a one-sided conversation. For thousands of years we’ve shouted questions into the darkness. Through prayer. Through philosophy. Through poetry. Through science. Through sheer stubbornness.
Sometimes answers come back. How stars work. How gravity works. How evolution works. But the deeper questions remain. And sometimes it feels as though humanity is standing at the edge of an infinite canyon shouting:
Is anybody there?
Only to hear its own voice echo back.
It was somewhere around this point that I encountered Camus. Or perhaps more accurately, encountered him again. What struck me wasn’t that he solved the problem. He didn’t. That’s precisely why he resonated.
Camus looked directly at the tension between humanity’s search for meaning and the silence it encounters when it asks for one. He called that collision the absurd. Most philosophies seem determined to resolve the tension. Camus simply acknowledged it. No hidden plan. No cosmic justice. No guarantee that suffering serves a purpose. No promise that the universe cares whether we succeed or fail. Just silence. And somehow, from that silence, he arrived not at despair but at dignity.
Then came Nietzsche. I admired him. I never trusted him. Nietzsche looked into the abyss and responded with defiance. Humanity would create its own values. Meaning would be forged rather than discovered. There is something undeniably powerful about that. But there was also something that felt angry, as though the universe had disappointed him and he intended to return the favor. Perhaps that’s unfair. But I found myself unable to follow him. I understood the rebellion. I couldn’t find the compassion.
Then came Simone Weil. Weil disturbed me for entirely different reasons. She looked at the same silence and saw not indifference but absence. God, she believed, withdraws from the world to create space for human freedom. The silence isn’t abandonment. It’s love.
I wanted to believe her. I genuinely did. But the more I sat with the idea, the more offensive it became. An indifferent universe is tragic, but at least it is innocent. It makes no promises and breaks none. A silent God is different. A silent God watches. A silent God observes children dying, lives unraveling, wars consuming generations, and then answers with absence. I could admire Weil’s faith without sharing it. In fact, the possibility of an absent God felt darker to me than no God at all.
Which left Camus. Not because he offered hope. Because he didn’t. Not because he explained suffering. Because he couldn’t. Not because he solved the problem, but because he refused to pretend it could be solved.
The image that remained was Sisyphus. Condemned to push a boulder uphill forever, fully aware that it will roll back down every single time. The Greeks intended it as punishment. Camus transformed it into a description of being human.
Everything rolls back down. The photographs fade. The memories disappear. The people we love eventually leave. We leave. Humanity itself will one day leave. The universe appears remarkably efficient at erasing its own history.
And yet we continue. We love people we know we will lose. We build things we know will not last. We ask questions we may never answer. Most importantly, we continue choosing kindness in a reality that offers no guarantee that kindness matters.
That was the part I couldn’t shake. Not the rebellion. Not the philosophy. The kindness. The refusal to become cruel simply because the universe appears indifferent. The refusal to surrender compassion because suffering is unavoidable. The refusal to let the abyss dictate the terms of your humanity.
I didn’t arrive at peace. I don’t think peace was ever on offer. What I found instead was recognition. The realization that perhaps there are no answers coming. No voice from the darkness. No final explanation waiting around the corner. Just us. A collection of temporary, frightened creatures trying to make sense of an existence we never asked for. And somehow, despite all of that, still capable of kindness.
The boulder still rolls back down. The void remains silent. The tragedy remains a tragedy. But tomorrow, like every day before it, we will bend down, put our shoulder against the stone, and push anyway. Not because it leads anywhere. Not because we have been promised a reward. But because, in the face of the abyss, choosing to remain human may be the only victory we get.