“What you seek is seeking you.” ~ Rumi

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“What is even the point of all this? This life?”

I remember asking my mentor this years ago while bawling and wailing because for the life of me, I couldn’t make sense of all the nonsense that was going on. Everything felt painful, exhausting, meaningless.

And instead of giving me a straight answer, he simply said, “You’re yet to discover what the point of your life is.” At that time, I hated that answer. I wanted certainty, clarity, something concrete to hold on to, and I spent years grappling with this question and nothing clicked.

However, it’s been almost 10 years since that conversation, and today, I can honestly say that I did eventually find my answer (to a large extent, and there is still more to discover as I go about life). But more importantly, it’s how I found it that matters. It didn’t come to me just like that. Life broke me in a hundred different ways, and every single time, I had to learn how to piece myself back together again. Perks of being an old soul, I guess. Ha.

And then somewhere along the way, I found myself sitting across people in the therapy space hearing the same question again and again: “What is the point of life?” “What is my purpose?” “Why are we even here?” “What’s the meaning of all this suffering?”

Sometimes I give them a long answer, sometimes I wait for them to discover it themselves, and at times, I gently guide them through inner and spiritual work until they slowly begin finding their own truths. But if someone had asked me this question years ago, I would have probably said, “Nothing. There is no purpose.”

Today, of course, is a different story.

Perhaps life does begin to feel meaningless when you are disconnected from yourself while endlessly chasing meaning in things that were never truly yours to begin with. You spend years chasing grades, jobs, money, relationships, status, validation, milestones, physiques, applause, success, because you are constantly told “become this, “achieve that,” “be more,” “do better,” “prove yourself,” and so on, and slowly, life becomes less about living and more about performing.

You think life is meaningless because one day you are going to die. But perhaps life feels meaningless because between life and death you are not truly living.

You are trapped in conditioning—standards, expectations, roles, comparisons. You are chained to ideas of who you “should” be, and if you fail to meet them, you start believing something is wrong with you.

And maybe your worth has become tied to external things more than you realise if:

1. You believe your life has value only when you are achieving something. If you are not progressing, producing, earning, achieving, or becoming “successful,” you feel restless, anxious, or empty.

2. You secretly believe you are nothing without your titles, job, achievements, relationship, salary, or status. You don’t see these things as experiences. You see them as proof that you matter.

3. You compare your life constantly. Comparison quietly destroys meaning because your life stops becoming an experience and turns into a competition. Criticism, comparison, and competition slowly begin to run your inner world.

4. You struggle to enjoy simple things unless they are “productive.” Even joy needs justification. Rest makes you feel guilty. Hobbies feel pointless unless they achieve something.

5. You are disconnected from your playful, curious inner child. The part of you that once explored, created, laughed, stumbled, experimented, and simply existed slowly got buried under pressure and survival.

6. You feel empty even after achieving things because achievement gives temporary relief, not lasting meaning.

7. You keep chasing the next milestone hoping it will finally make you feel fulfilled, but fulfillment keeps moving further away because the problem was never the milestone.

8. You are terrified of failure because your identity depends on success. Failure doesn’t feel like an event. It feels like proof that you are unworthy.

9. You seek meaning outside yourself—in validation, praise, applause, being chosen, recognition. And so your inner world becomes dependent on external approval.

10. You don’t really know who you are beneath all the conditioning. When you strip away titles, trophies, expectations, roles, and validation…there is confusion. Who are you really?

And perhaps this is where things begin to break apart because all your life you are taught to look outside of yourself. You look at what others are doing, creating, achieving, becoming, and somewhere along the way, you start feeling smaller, lesser.

You are always behind, not enough, not worthy.

But do you ever stop and question why?

Why does someone else’s success make you doubt your own existence?

Why do you feel like you are lacking something?

Why do you feel like everyone else has “it” figured out except you?

Perhaps because from a young age, you were told directly or indirectly that you lack something—something important, something necessary for happiness, love, success, belonging, or worthiness. And you believed it. You internalised it. And you stayed small and stuck. You became and remained disconnected from your own nature while trying to become everything the world asked you to be. But you cannot grow if you never sit with yourself, if you never examine your life story and you never dare to ask difficult questions and answer them honestly.

And perhaps that is the real work of life. It’s not endlessly chasing.

But becoming conscious. It’s about changing the script because in this world, there are often two kinds of people:

1. Those who hate their life story and themselves but do nothing about it.

2. And those who decide to change, to evolve, to become someone they themselves can connect to.

And perhaps it is only after that connection with self begins that meaning slowly starts to emerge, not from outside of you but from within.

And maybe that is the real journey of life—to strip away everything you were told you had to be and slowly come back to what remains underneath.

The simplest truth: “I am.” Spiritually, “I am” is existence before labels, titles, before success, before failure, comparison, validation.

It is the understanding that your existence itself carries value and that beneath all the conditioning, there is still a self—your mind, heart, spirit, your nature, creativity, your abilities, your essence, and your potential to experience, create, connect, and contribute.

And when you sit and give all the credit to that grade, job, relationship, salary, or opportunity that changed your life, you forget something important—those things came to you because there was already something within you. Someone saw something in you. Yes, maybe it was timing, maybe grace, maybe intelligence, effort, or maybe the universe simply decided to be kind. But you were still the magnet, and perhaps meaning is lost because you keep searching for it outside yourself while it quietly waits within you. This meaning that we keep searching for comes from connection with self. It comes through the expression of self, through creation, contribution, authenticity, and presence.

So if making origami made someone smile or if your art brought warmth into someone’s home, if your words made someone feel less alone, if your existence softened someone’s difficult day even slightly, that matters. That is meaningful because meaning does not only come from “big” things; it comes from feeling connected to yourself while you are here. It comes from expression without fear of judgment, from creating because something inside you wants to come alive, from contribution that emerges naturally from your essence.

Life and death themselves are not fully in your hands. You control far less than you think you do, which is perhaps why meaning cannot come only from external outcomes, because outcomes will always remain uncertain.

Life is nothing more than a cycle of life and death, and pain is given because whether you like it or not, that is often how growth happens. Pain reveals the patterns you need to outgrow, and it takes courage to face those patterns instead of endlessly escaping them through achievement, validation, distraction, or conformity.

So if life feels meaningless to you right now, perhaps you are not entirely wrong. Life does begin to feel meaningless when you are disconnected from yourself, trapped in conditioning, endlessly running on a wheel trying to prove your worth.

But if you want to move to the other side, something has to change. You have to stop endlessly chasing and start connecting. You have to question the patterns keeping you miserable. You have to stop asking, “What do I need to become in order to matter?”And start asking, “Who am I underneath everything I was taught to be?” Because the meaning of life is not to constantly prove that your life mattered. It is to actually live it while you are here.

Just like you are seeking your purpose, it is also seeking you. It’s just waiting for you to come back to yourself first.