I always thought there would be more. As a kid I read a lot of books, and I somehow got it in my mind that my life contained some ultimate quest which the muses would sing about for generations to come. I was gonna unravel the secrets of the universe, I was gonna come up with something better than relativity or strings, I was gonna kill Voldemort. I was also a generally realistic kid despite this, and I knew no eleven-year-old with a misshapen prefrontal cortex could show up Einstein, so I waited. I waited for things to finally matter. I knew nothing in the middle school halls was consequential enough to care about. I knew seventh graders used the term “love of my life” much too liberally, and I knew every friend group would fall apart and hate each other and then like each other again in a monthly cycle. The days only served as my exposition, my establishing shot, my “Early life” section on Wikipedia.

I trudged to lunch through the nauseating Arizona heat on the first day of seventh grade, aware of how little everything ultimately mattered, like looking through the wrong end of a telescope and compressing whole children into little pinheads. The entire cafeteria stunk like lunch meat, and the “hot-lunch” line extended around a corner. Used to eating at my leisure over break and probably having skipped breakfast, my stomach churned angrily by the time I got my food and scanned the room for my friends. 

At a long wooden table, above the roar of a hundred kids, a group of friends huddled, as if discussing some important business deal. My friend Zoe was gushing about her summer. She visited her boyfriend back in New York, where she moved from last semester (“Long distance is hard, but I love him”). They would break up later that month.

“So what did you do over break?” she asked me.

“Not much.” The days blurred together and I couldn’t remember a single thing—none of it mattered much anyway.

After middle school, I stopped reading novels and started reading texts for class.

Freshman year, my class read John Calvin. We discussed his belief of predestination and whether or not anything we did was of our own free choice. At first, the consensus was yes, we certainly felt in control of our decisions. If you walked into an ice cream shop and chose strawberry, of course you made that decision. But could you have chosen vanilla? Did destiny bind you to that moment in time, the moment that you saw the pink tub, remembered some character or old friend, and decided that strawberry would taste the best to you? Were all the little atoms in your brain merely ticking on their cue, dots arranging themselves in a line, carrying out a chain of events as inevitable as a row of dominoes falling in a line, all leading up to strawberry? Even if you decided, somehow, completely randomly in your head, free from previous experience or reason, was the choice ever yours?

By the end of class, the board was scribbled with blue and black expo leaving little clumps where it was erased and stinging everyone’s nostrils. The room knew what their deliberating meant. Every choice rendered meaningless, we were all doomed to do what we do. If not because of the influences of the world out of our control that we are inextricably linked to, then because we are a group of floating stardust lattes who happen to be bumping around in the same cosmic terrarium. The little flashes and squirts of chemicals in our head might as well be all that exists.

The realization reared its ugly head. It wasn’t that nothing mattered at the moment because I was young, it was that, ultimately, nothing mattered. No quest waited for me to complete, no meaning waited for me to uncover. Middle school wasn’t the only place love didn’t exist, love didn’t exist period. 

I looked back. Was that it? Did nothing count for anything? Was there no point to life, was it all meaningless? Was beauty and love and happiness all made up?

They didn’t feel made up.

The sunset felt pretty beautiful, even if there was no objective measure of it. I could ask for the point of a sunset, and discuss how many sunsets have existed of equal or greater measure in the history of the Earth and the history of all planets in the universe. Or I could stand and watch the colors on the clouds make the sky look on fire, and I could call my family out to the deck, and I could not want to blink for fear of missing even a moment of it. 

It didn’t matter if beauty was made up. It didn’t make the sky appear less beautiful to me. Why could I afford this consideration to a sunset and not to myself? The more I thought about my revelation, the more it came like a blessing. I realized life wasn’t a book–life was reading a book. It’s absurd. We know the characters are made up, the world was never in danger, the ending was planned since before you even read the first word, and you can do nothing to change events. Yet, still, we read, we love the characters, we laugh when they triumph, and we cry when they fail. Even though Zoe broke up with her boyfriend in the end, she at least had a better summer than I did in seventh grade. While I waited for meaning to come to me, she created her own. She went through her quest, through love and heartbreak, even though it was written out from the start. She thought it was meaningful, so it was. 

Life has no point, we are insignificant and unremarkable, everyone will die, blah blah blah. Yet we care—we care so much. Is there not something absurd about waking up every morning just to feel our bodies breathe and creak and digest? Is there not something beautiful about it too? Is it not absurd to commit our whole lives to another person, completely unknowing whether you will actually succeed or not? Is it not beautiful to at least give it our best shot? 

Our lives have no preordained purpose. We must place meaning into every experience, and in every experience we will find meaning. It does not exist solely with the defeat of Voldemort or in unknown lands and spaceship battles. It exists in every stretch and yawn, in every tear shed for a book you knew was gonna end like this. It exists in every careful observation of the bits of dust captured in the quiet streams of light through the blinds, and in every moment in between. Life is as simple as this, and it is enough.