During my junior year in high school, I became mired in a quest to figure out what my life purpose was and how to live out a genuine Christian life. I was disillusioned by the superficiality of church. I was disappointed in the failure of my friends, family, and peers to understand me. I was yearning for a truly unconditional love and an unwavering companionship that was so idealized in the Bible. I was longing to know my purpose here on Earth. I was desperate for truth.
I was convinced that I had to find an answer. I had to arrive at a conclusion. And if I couldn’t? Then my life, bereft of meaning and purpose, was no longer worth living.
A few emotionally traumatic experiences and several bouts of depression later, I had stumbled across the Book of Ecclesiastes, and the work of Albert Camus:
7 The light is pleasant, and it is good for the eyes to see the sun. 8 Indeed, if a person lives many years, let him rejoice in them all; but let him remember the days of darkness, for they will be many. Everything that is to come will be futility. 9 Rejoice, young man, during your childhood, and let your heart be pleasant during the days of young manhood. And follow the impulses of your heart and the desires of your eyes. Yet know that God will bring you to judgment for all these things. 10 So, remove grief and anger from your heart and put away pain from your body, because childhood and the prime of life are fleeting.
— Ecclesiastes 11:9-10
"You will never be happy if you continue to search for what happiness consists of. You will never live if you are looking for the meaning of life."
— Albert Camus
At that moment, I thought that I had found truth. I thought that I had arrived at the final destination of understanding life as it was—realizing that what I needed was to just be able to live in the moment, to spread kindness in our world, to see the genuine happiness and joy I could bring to people no matter how insignificant my contribution seemed.
The reality was that I don't think I learned how to let go of my grief and anger, I don't think I figured out what happiness truly consisted of, and I don't think I figured out how to live a life worth living. Looking back, what I saw then was a vague glimpse of the outlines of a greater truth, a glance at a tattered map toward an elusive treasure, a loose grasp on a semblance of revelation in the midst of doubt, a warm sunlight that phases in and out of a room by the shroud of passing clouds. I stumbled across the exact wisdom that I needed to hear, but I just didn’t get it. It made sense to me, but I was still fundamentally the same person. Grief, anger, regret, doubt, and self-hatred still lingered in my soul. Realizing this and having endured enough of the emotional turmoil of the past, I had given up on answering those questions altogether, and I would continue my life into college continuing to make the same mistakes and living with the same discontentment that plagued me in my adolescence.
The age when we begin to entertain the existential crises in our lives—when cynical and misanthropic thoughts begin to permeate our consciousness, when our souls beckon, no, beg us to dig deeper, to find meaning, to find purpose—is the same age where we least understand these confounding aspects of our lives. At that age, we understand so little about the world, about our own perception of life, let alone that of others. We lack the wisdom that comes with years, if not decades, of experience to inform us about ourselves and our life decisions. We're barely past the stage of being merely oblivious children; we've dabbled our feet into the darkness and the void, but we cannot even begin to bear the piercing light that shines through the cracks—a bravado to comprehend an incomprehensible truth.
But I will argue that neither the Bible or Camus are telling us to give up on the quest to find meaning in our lives and what ultimately fulfills us as human beings. I don’t believe that they are arguing that everyone just give up pondering the secrets to their happiness and life purpose by preemptively acknowledging their ignorance and naivete; in fact, I would say that it is all the more reason to do the opposite—to think about these hard questions as you go and to commit yourself to a lifelong quest to understand.
My mistake was thinking that I found truth, that I arrived at a revelation on how to live my life. What I didn’t understand is that we will never know enough. It is impossible to know the perfect moment for you to begin your search. The key is not to embrace our ignorance; the key is to embrace the unknown. It is not about giving up on yourself in this dip when the unknown hits you harder mentally and emotionally than anything you've ever experienced in your life. It's about accustoming yourself to simultaneously say "I don't know" and "I want to understand," so that you can avoid burning yourself out through desperation. You can still enjoy your youth, but lest we forget that the point of a journey is not to arrive; let your experiences—the days filled with light and the days filled with darkness alike—shape your perception, your worldview, and who you are.
Perhaps we're all wrong about the Christian life—maybe we're missing the entire point when we wait for blessings to come, when we obsess over heaven or hell, when we flaunt our accomplishments in the church or how much theological knowledge we've attained, when we stand around waiting for Jesus' return, when we constantly fixate on each and every possible reward or punishment, when we think that we have to fully conquer our doubts and arrive at a firm conclusion about our faith. Those things neither constitute the point of the journey. It could be that the practice, as Seth Godin argues, is the driving force behind the change we all desperately want to bring to the world. It is the kind of consistent generosity and compassion despite our doubts, the kind of attention and care and genuine desire to understand more, a daily contribution to those around us and thus humanity as a whole, and a patience to know that there are few absolutes in life when it comes to the innumerable paths that each of us have to walk. There is something about the practice of letting yourself be proven wrong, to be in denial, and to think that your life is banal and inconsequential. This practice teaches you something about the human condition and the weight and burden that bears on all of us.
It took me eight years to understand this. It was only in 2022 when I could finally look myself in the mirror, when I could finally dig into the abysmal depths of my being and say that, without regret, I am proud to be the person I am today. If you asked me if I could magically have those years back—those eight years I supposedly squandered on futile self-reflection, self-doubt, all those tears I've shed, all the relationships I’ve torn apart, and all the emotional trauma I've endured—I wouldn't understand what you mean. Because all that pain and strife and turmoil taught me to understand what it truly means to be empathetic and to be a sensitive, compassionate human being. It taught me not only about the darkness that lurks beneath all of our souls, but also the light that lies ever further within those depths.