We All Hope to Be Footnotes to Big Questions: Anchoring Meaning in Ordinary Life

I was riding along an elevated highway once, watching the world blur past outside the window, when a bizarre thought popped into my head and wouldn’t let go.

“What if this elevated highway suddenly collapsed right now? What if the car I’m in went hurtling off the edge, spinning in slow motion through midair, then accelerating into the ground—crashing, exploding into fire and smoke? And what if I died right then, or lay there half-dead for a bit—what of it?”

I like to imagine my face would probably be calm, quietly accepting that my time had come. But thinking about it more realistically, survival instinct is hardwired. Chances are it’d be pure terror—screaming my lungs out, or too terrified to make a sound at all.

The closest thing I’ve had to a “near-death experience” was riding a roller coaster. At first, I sat there completely calm. But after some rational deliberation, I realized I probably shouldn’t be looking so unbothered, so I joined in and started screaming in rhythm with everyone else. Later, my friend told me I nearly blew out her eardrums.

In theory, the whole process ought to be calm. We’ve lived for twenty-odd years without adding any real surplus meaning to the world; dying now wouldn’t be much of a loss. We’ve lived for twenty-some years—if death could lend a touch of distinction to an ordinary name (or handle, which probably fits better), that wouldn’t be a bad trade-off either.

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Yet look back at history, and those who actually leave their names behind are a tiny minority. And for the vast majority who do manage to leave a name, you have no way of knowing what it ever meant beyond the letters themselves. It’s just a data point, not a human being.

Still, the purpose of “history” is for those who come after. For those of us living in the present, being able to convince ourselves is enough.

For a long time, I spent my days turning over “the meaning of life” in my head. My interim conclusion was simple: life has no meaning. And if life has no inherent meaning, the only logical destination is nihilism. But the moment I gave meaning to death, I realized something: it’s not just death—we can give life far more meaning, too.

He tells you not to listen to the so-called song of life, but to feel the solid ground beneath your feet and the raw grain of living.

In the end, we still need a few “big questions” to give meaning to our ordinary lives. Or put more precisely:

• All of us hope to be footnotes to big questions.
• All of us need to be more proactive about giving new meaning to our ordinary, meaningless lives that last less than a century.

In Lord of the Mysteries (a popular Chinese fantasy web novel), the path to godhood is a continuous struggle between divinity and humanity. The closer you get to a god, the further you drift from being human, and the closer you teeter toward losing control. The way to push back is by building “anchors”—your believers, your family, your friends.

And the process of choosing our own “big questions” is essentially the process of building anchors.

The more anchors you have, the harder it is to lose control.