Recently I’ve been quiet.
To those I haven’t replied to for a while, I’m sorry. Truly. It wasn’t personal.
It’s just that things have been difficult.
I’ve always considered myself a positive person. An optimist. An overcomer.
There have been moments in my life where only God knows how I made it through. Somehow, I always seemed to survive. More than survive, actually. I seemed to thrive.
The irony is that now, after achieving many of the things I once desperately wanted, after finally finding some stability and comfort, I find myself asking a question I never expected to ask:
What’s the point?
One sunny day, you wake up and the world simply stops making sense.
Nothing catastrophic has happened. Your life might even look good from the outside. Yet somewhere deep inside, a quiet question begins to whisper:
“Is this all there is?”
“Does life have meaning?”
And it’s not simply because I am Russian and genetically predisposed to overthinking, though Tolstoy, Dostoevsky and so many others in classic literature might suggest otherwise.
I will never forget that morning
We were on a yacht in the Mediterranean.
The party had finally ended. The music had faded, the champagne glasses stood empty and the first light of dawn began to spill across the sea.
Everyone else had disappeared below deck.
Only he and I remained, watching the sun rise. He was a Russian oligarch. No names will ever be mentioned.
He had everything the world tells us to want. Extraordinary wealth. Power. Limitless freedom. A life most people only ever imagine.
After a moment of silence, he turned to me and quietly asked,
“What’s the point of all this?”
I was lost for words.
He had everything, travelled the world, dated some of the most beautiful women in the world, including famous singers and actresses. Every luxury imaginable was available to him.
And yet there he was, asking me this question,
At the time, I had no answer.
Today, I understand it far better than I wish I did.
Because there comes a moment when luxury no longer impresses, success no longer satisfies and even pleasure begins to lose its flavour.
The things we spend our lives chasing no longer give us what we thought they would.
And that is where a different journey begins.
Not the pursuit of more.
The pursuit of meaning.
The Problem of Meaninglessness
I once came across a story in Irvin Yalom’s Existential Psychotherapy that perfectly captures this feeling.
Imagine a group of workers carrying bricks from one side of a field to the other.
As soon as they finish, they carry the same bricks back again.
Day after day.
Year after year.
One day, one of them stops and asks:
“Why am I doing this?”
From that moment on, he can never be as content as he was before.
Yalom’s point is fascinating.
Perhaps people who ask these uncomfortable questions are not seeing too little.
Perhaps they’re seeing too much.
Maybe an existential crisis isn’t a sign that you’ve failed to understand life.
Maybe it’s a sign that you’re beginning to see life more clearly than before.
And that realisation can be overwhelming.
Because once you’ve seen the question, it’s impossible to unsee it.
Tolstoy’s Crisis
What surprised me most when I began exploring these thoughts was discovering that many of the greatest minds in history experienced exactly the same thing.
Leo Tolstoy certainly did.
At the height of his success, he had achieved almost everything a person could want.
Fame. Wealth. A family. Literary immortality.
And yet he found himself tormented by a simple question:
Why write books?
Why raise children?
Why accumulate wealth?
Why pursue success?
He realised that every answer eventually led to another question.
And every achievement eventually seemed swallowed by the reality that one day we all die.
Tolstoy described reaching a point where life itself felt meaningless.
What struck me wasn’t his despair.
It was the fact that someone who had achieved so much could still feel it.
Perhaps meaninglessness visits everyone eventually.
Especially those who have achieved what they thought would make them happy.
“…Five years ago something very strange began to happen to me. At first I began having moments of bewilderment, when my life would come to a halt, as if I did not know how to live or what to do; I would lose my presence of mind and fall into a state of depression. But this passed and I continued to live as before. Then the moments of bewilderment recurred more frequently, and they always took the same form. Whenever my life came to a halt, the questions would arise: Why? And what next?”
The only thing that amazed me was how I had failed to realise this in the very beginning. All this had been common knowledge for so long. If not today, then tomorrow sickness and death will come (indeed, they were already approaching) to everyone, to me and nothing will remain except the stench and the worms. My deeds, whatever they may be, will be forgotten sooner or later and I myself will be no more. Why, then, do anything? How can anyone fail to see this and live? That’s what is amazing! It is possible to live only as long as life intoxicates us; once we are sober we cannot help seeing that it is all a delusion, a stupid delusion! Nor is there anything funny or witty about it; it is only cruel and stupid.”
– excerpt from Tolstoy’s Confession
What If Meaninglessness Is Growth?
This brings me to an idea from David Deida.
When we’re children, we become obsessed with toys.
Then one day we outgrow them.
The toys haven’t changed.
We have.
Then we become obsessed with other things.
Money.
Relationships.
Status.
Achievement.
Adventure.
Luxury.
Success.
These things matter. They can be beautiful. They can enrich life.
But what happens when you’ve experienced many of them and still feel restless?
What happens when you’ve finally arrived somewhere you’ve spent years trying to reach, only to discover the horizon hasn’t disappeared?
Perhaps meaninglessness isn’t always a sign that something is wrong.
Perhaps it’s a sign that something inside you is evolving.
The soul outgrowing its previous ambitions.
The spirit asking for something deeper.
Not necessarily a rejection of life.
Not a rejection of success.
But an invitation to discover what lies beyond it.
Is There a Solution?
I am not sure there is a perfect answer.
But I suspect part of the answer lies in whether we see our lives as random events or as a story.
Stories have meaning.
They have movement.
Structure.
Purpose.
Even suffering becomes meaningful when it belongs to a larger narrative.
But when life feels like disconnected experiences, it can begin to feel random.
Fragmented.
Empty.
The existentialists believed life gives us the raw material.
What we do with it is up to us.
We don’t always choose the events.
But we do choose what they mean to us and how we perceive them.
We do choose what kind of story we are writing every day.
And perhaps that’s enough.
