Where Are We Going?
Journeying without destination
Hey guys, I’m finally back after a couple months without publishing! Truth is, life has been zipping by and I’ve been so overwhelmed by trying to keep up with it that Fieldnotes has grown forgotten at the bottom of my (metaphorical) backpack.
So for context, here’s what I’ve been up to:
After leaving Ecuador, I took on Peru. Met fellow travelers in Cusco, did Machu Picchu for my birthday, and got a taste of hippie life in Pisac. Later I made my way to Lima, where I ate some of the best food I’ve ever had, then made a short trip to the beach town of Paracas and the desert oasis of Huacachina. I quite like Peru — and I’ll tell you more about it later.
I wanted to follow the recommendations of my European friends and see Bolivia, but was deterred by the $160 entry visa recently put on American tourists (a retaliation against Trump’s foreign policy!). So instead, I skipped ahead and stayed with a college friend from Paraguay for a week — a friend whom I hosted years ago in Seattle, though I never thought I’d actually take him up on his reciprocal offer, which started with a slightly sarcastic “well, next time you’re in Paraguay…”
After that, I moved to Argentina to reunite with my family in Buenos Aires for the holidays and tried a very different pace of travel; boutique hotels and fancy restaurants made for a lovely contrast to my previous life of $6 hostels and luke-warm empanadas. I also got to visit the breathtaking Iguazu falls and drink delicious Malbecs in Mendoza, Argentina’s renown wine country (for $4 a bottle!).
So after a few months of fun (and challenge), I have no shortage of Fieldnotes-worthy content. Now that I’m finally settled down in Uruguay for a few weeks, I want to resume with a multi-post project that feels a bit more meaningful than just a fun travel blog. Over the next few publications, I plan to walk through an admittedly existential — and hopefully coherent — take on what it might mean to live a good life. Many of these thoughts have never left the pages of my personal journal, so I appreciate you bearing with me and, as always, thanks for reading.
The Existential Question
Between adventuring, there were a couple of moments in my trip where I began to panic and had to ask myself what am I doing here? These moments usually came as a result of finding myself lost without a plan — either because plans fell apart or because I simply didn’t think that far ahead. I was alone and had no commitments. There were buses going every direction, more awesome destinations than I could possibly visit, and nobody to tell me what to do. I felt like I had too much freedom and didn’t know how to handle it. Here, in the face of panic, I started to question “what am I even doing?”
Directionlessness can be debilitating, especially when you’re not used to it. It struck me in those moments just how unfamiliar I was to that feeling of uncertainty. For the last sixteen years, my life has been a straightforward path and I’ve never had to question what comes next. From kindergarten to the end of high school, success was clearly laid out, one grade after another. Then comes four years of college, which I also never really questioned, because in my world, that’s just what you do. Each year had requirements, boxes to check, benchmarks to hit — it was always clear exactly what was expected of you. Teachers give you a step-by-step recipe to “success,” until eventually, you finish and are awarded a framed piece of paper that says “I did it!”
And just like that, you’re thrown out into the world.
Suddenly, there’s no more structure and you’re left with something that feels remarkably like wearing a dirty backpack and staring at an unmarked map of Peru: vast options, no preassigned requirements, and the urgent question of now, what the hell am I supposed to do?
The default path is laid out relatively well: go get a job, make money, get married, start a family, work your ass off, then retire and die. It’s a very clear track, defined almost as clearly as your grade school schedule. In fact, it’s so clear and the stakes feel so high — with money and your own survival on the line — that you’re granted the luxury of distraction and you don’t really have to dwell on existential questions. At least not until you’re settled enough to have a midlife crisis.
Well, some little “genius” in me thought it would be a good idea to take a peek outside that linear path and take a traveling gap year.
That led me here, both on the road and in life, staring down the same question: where am I going? The panic I felt in those directionless moments in Ecuador and Peru is just a mirror into the uncertainty I feel as a recent grad, wondering what it is I’m doing with my life. Nobody’s telling me exactly how to “succeed,” so I’m left to figure it out for myself.
To find my direction, I decided to start with the big picture — maybe the biggest picture. So — lost in South America — I found myself standing face-to-face with a giant, overbearing question that looks something like what’s the meaning of life?
And let me tell you — it’s a scary thing to look at.
My Search for an Answer
I have enough common sense to know the “meaning of life” probably isn’t as simple as making more money. I’ve taken enough psychedelics to know my answer won’t be found in church. And I’ve now traveled enough to understand that the possibilities in life are far more expansive than they tell you in school.
Still, for years, I’ve obsessed over finding “meaning” in a world that doesn’t seem to care. It turned about in my mind during long walks, stargazing nights, and in epic, mountaintop meditations — when it felt like some nugget of wisdom should reveal itself. I was asking big questions and naïvely expected big answers — something definitive, something universal. Some sort of “diploma” from life to tell me I was doing it all right.
I found nothing.
No matter how hard I tried, I wouldn’t come to find anything resembling cosmic meaning. No grand answer. No key to “win.”
But in admitting failure and giving up on my fruitless search, I began to entertain a possibility that felt way outside the box: maybe there is no answer, no real meaning in life at all — at least not by default.
At first, this was uncomfortable to accept. I would’ve liked a clearer objective, something like reach enlightenment, find God, or even slay a giant cyclops and complete your Odyssey. But no, instead I landed on something far more modest and far more abstract: there’s just life.
We just exist on this planet, wherever we are right now, doing whatever it is we’re doing. I don’t believe there’s a man in the sky watching down on us, nor do I believe we have some remarkable, divine importance. Not too long ago, we believed ourselves to be the center of the universe. To medieval people, the sun revolved around the Earth, as did the heavens, other planets, and the rest of space. Well, eventually we realized that was all a bunch of human-centered ignorance and that in reality, we’re nothing more than tiny specks on a pale blue dot, floating around a modest-sized star, in an unremarkable galaxy, somewhere in the infinite vastness of the universe.
Science has given us this awe-inspiring — and potentially liberating — perspective of our cosmic insignificance and has taught us the important lesson that it would be naïve — and maybe even self-centered — to think our lives are as significant in the universe as they feel to us.
Later, I found out this way of seeing the world actually has a name: Optimistic Nihilism. It’s the belief that life has no inherent meaning and that there may be no “point” to it all, but frames it as an opportunity, rather than a tragedy. For many of us living in the modern era — a time when the progress of science and technology contradict the stories of religion, but often leave us feeling empty — this perspective might resonate for its attempt to reconcile meaning with truth.
I came to find comfort in this because it freed me from having to live my life for any other reason than to make the most of my brief time on Earth. Without an external source of meaning or a spiritual “finish line” to reach, life becomes less about arriving somewhere and more about experiencing what’s already here. If nothing in this life matters beyond us, that might be the exact permission some of us need to live more fully.
“The proper function of man is to live, not to exist. I shall not waste my days trying to prolong them. I shall use my time.” – Jack London
That obviously didn’t do a very good job of answering the question of where are we going?, nor did it help me choose which bus I wanted to take during those directionless moments in my travels. If anything, it gave me an ounce of perspective and a reminder that it doesn’t matter quite so much — there’s no right or wrong answer.
Great! But what now?
As it turns out, the wisdom I was looking for rested elsewhere, in an entirely different question…
I’ll post again soon :)
Couldn’t sleep thinking about this blog post
So happy you’re having these great experiences, and it’s YOU creating the landscape to have these experiences. Keep taking it all in and lovin these posts!