The Meaning of Life
Potential Difference — notes on life, meaning and the human spirit
The pull of the summit
There is something about the human spirit that I find almost unbelievable. Why would anyone want to stand on top of Everest, or drag a sled across the poles? There is nothing practical up there. Nobody needs to stand on a summit. And yet people have gone, freezing, starving, sometimes dying, because a question about human limits was too much to leave alone.
We are a strange mix. We are intelligent, curious and, at times, a little stupid. The same mind that figures out how to survive at 8,000 metres is the one that decided going up there was a good idea. I have come to think the curiosity and the recklessness come from the same place. Most of what we have achieved began with someone doing something that looked foolish at the time.
When life makes no sense
Then there are the stories that break your heart. Young children lost in an accident before they had a chance to grow up. A little boy who lived with a lump for most of his childhood, whose father finally found a way to get him treated, only for him to die on the operating table from the anaesthetic. What kind of life is this? What was the purpose of a life that ends so soon?
I don’t have a tidy answer, and I’m wary of anyone who claims one. But I have come to believe that a life’s meaning does not depend on its length. A child who lives four years has loved and been loved, has changed the people around them, and has been completely themselves. That is not a draft of a life. In its own way, it is whole. And the grief we feel is itself proof that the meaning was there. We don’t grieve for what didn’t matter.
Lives as containers
Working in technology, I can’t help seeing life a little like a container in Docker or Kubernetes. It spins up, does its job and is gone. Ephemeral.
But look at what survives. The work the container did persists. The requests it served were served, the data it wrote stays written. In our lives, that is the love we gave, the people we changed and the problems we solved for someone else. The container is gone, but the state it changed lives on in the system. And unlike any container, we stop to ask why we were here at all. Maybe that question is what makes us more than workloads.
Potential difference
Current only flows when there is a potential difference. With no difference in voltage, nothing moves. I think life works the same way. There has to be some sadness for us to feel happiness. A life lived at one flat level would not feel like peace. It would feel like a dead circuit.
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So when a low comes, I try to accept it rather than fight it. Not take it for granted, but accept it as a season and not a permanent state. The low is often where the growth happens. And when the mind runs to the worst case, as human minds are built to do, I remind myself of my own track record: I have come through every low so far.
Emotion as currency, perspective as price
I recently heard someone describe emotion as currency, and it stuck with me. Every reaction costs something. If we live on the edge, tired and stretched thin, we are already broke, and every small thing feels like a crisis.
Perspective decides the price. When my child is giving me a hard time, I think of someone who prays for a child to make noise in their house. When work is hard, I think of someone who would love to have my problems. When I’m stuck in traffic, I remember I have a car, a job to drive to and a body that gets me there. Zoom out one step, and the same moment costs much less.
Love, fear and the genes
Technically speaking, evolution is about genes getting passed on. Fear keeps us alive long enough to reproduce. Love makes sure our young survive. Much of what is wrong in this world can be traced back to fear in disguise: greed, control, hatred. Much of what is right grows from love.
But nature’s programming is not the whole story. Evolution gave us drives, and it also gave us brakes: empathy, conscience and self-control. A drive can explain behaviour, but it never excuses it. Being human comes down to which one we let steer.
Beyond the programming
Here is what fascinates me most. Biology says the point is reproduction. We arrive, we survive, we pass on our genes, we leave. Yet humans are flexible enough to find meaning in a thousand other ways. People without children live deeply meaningful lives. Some of the people who shaped history left ideas behind, not descendants. Nature gives us instructions, and we get to decide what to do with them.
That, to me, is the power of the human spirit. It feels close to infinite.
The point of service
When I put it all together, I keep arriving at the same place. What gives people satisfaction at the end of a life is knowing they created some value, served something larger than themselves, and mattered to someone.
Caesar said, “I came, I saw, I conquered.” I would rather it be said of me:
I came, I served, I left.
