The Meaning of Life

I overthink everything. Always have. What to eat, am I doing the right thing, what does it mean to overthink, whether that text I sent was weird. My brain doesn't have an off switch.

So naturally, when it came to figuring out the meaning and direction of my life, I didn't just wonder about it casually. I've spent years turning it over. Constant prayers and late nights thinking about how the hell I'm supposed to navigate the next 50+ years. What I actually believe about why we're here and how to lead a good life.

I started by trying to define life itself. I believe having an intentional, clear understanding of the words we speak is essential to living to your fullest potential. Words create or at least map your entire reality... I will go deeper on this in another article. Now what words actually describe what it means to be alive?

Growth. Evolution. Creation. Learning. Building. Connecting. Learning. Teaching. Contributing. Experiencing.

Every word that genuinely describes being alive is about forward movement. And every activity that feels truly meaningful maps back to one of those words.

Think about the moments in your life that felt the most alive. Learning something new. Teaching somebody. Helping someone else improve. Raising Children. Connecting deeply with another person. Creating something that didn't exist before. They all share one thing: growth.

The Opposite of Life

If life is growth, then the opposite of life isn't necessarily death. It's stagnation, degradation, decay, close-mindedness, unhealthy habits.

And here's the part most people don't want to hear. There is no neutral. You're either getting better or you're getting worse. A relationship that stops growing starts decaying. Skills you stop developing start fading. The body you stop training starts breaking down.

Steve Siebold put it simply: "You're either growing or dying. Stagnation does not exist in the universe."

Tony Robbins has been saying it for years: "Progress equals happiness. Even if you're not where you want to be yet. If you're on the road, if you're improving, if you're making progress, you're gonna love it."

Einstein believed intellectual growth should start at birth and cease only at death.

These people come from completely different worlds and arrived at the same conclusion. Growth isn't just a nice idea. It's the mechanism for a meaningful life.

The Filter

Sin, the way I see it, isn't a list of rules you break. It's anything that blocks or reverses growth. Destruction. Cruelty. Closed-mindedness. Anything that stops you from becoming the best you could be, or others from becoming the best they could be.

Instead of asking "is this the right thing to do or how I should be spending my time?" I ask "is this moving me toward growth or away from it?", "is this helping the people around me become the best version of themselves, or holding them back?"

Learning to ask the right questions is an invaluable skill that should be practiced. The right question could create incredible change. Sometimes the honest answer is uncomfortable. The answer might make you question your health, your relationship, your daily habits, the way you treat people, the way your treat yourself. Habits that served you in one season becoming the thing holding you back in the next.

Growth looks different for everyone and changes in different seasons or phases of life. For one person it's starting a business. For another it's learning to be vulnerable. For another it's finally going back to school. Maybe it's changing the people you hang around. The specific path matters less than the fact that you're on one.