Very well said and an interesting read.

I went through an existential crises like that as well some years ago and ended up completely changing my career. It's unfortunate though, that it is so hard to do something so simple in society like changing professions or ones lifestyle. There are so many barriers in place in society - like mortgages and rent, the overall cost of living and the time and monetary cost of school or training, if those things are needed.

I'm sure that everyone gets through their existential phase differently and finds meaning in their own way. For me I found meaning through the realization that life has no meaning and there is no universal purpose. I wasn't born for a specific reason, I was just born. "Meaning" and "purpose" are just the brain's way of making sense of reality, to maintain the ego and drive the person forward in order to survive. You can see this in the way that meaning and purpose shifts within the person over time. When something or some behavior no longer makes sense to the individual, the brain comes up with a new meaning and a new purpose to drive them forward - professional goals turn into spiritual goals which turn into family or relationship goals and so on. Even for me, the idea of "no meaning and no purpose" is just more of the same, another way of making sense of reality. The idea that "Life has no meaning" is still just another brain interpretation and another way of making sense of reality (i.e. of finding meaning) lol.

In the end humans are just alive for a time and then they die. They are essentially just given a gift of time which they can do with it what they wish. Ideally they would do things they enjoyed or which they value. It's like, if you could wake up in your dreams tonight and do anything you wanted to for a few hours, then what would you do? To me that is a simple definition of life. Or if you could start life over and be a different person, how would you live that life? You have 50-100 years worth of time to kill, so what would you like to do? If a person is able to answer those questions than the obvious solution would be to just do those things now in this life. The difficulty of course though is that again, there are also barriers within society that make things difficult (which is also kind of what you said in your post as well regarding school and what not). So the person has to find a way to do what they want in life while also navigating the challenges and constraints of our reality. It's a lot like a game really, but a game played in different ways by different people and with different goals in the end - money and possessions, family and relationships, and even spiritual enlightenment are all just different ways of the ego attaching itself to an idea in order to find meaning to keep the organism striving towards life and to keep them playing the game.

I just want to conclude this very long and rambling novel by saying that this is just my interpretation of life and what makes sense to me, but really, its also meaningless hahaha 😆