disclaimer: the approach for the writing below is from philosophical views; hence, you might find some of the implications not comfortable; if so, please stop reading it.

This writing was my attempt to find direction after facing an existential crisis.

Is surviving enough?

I started by observing things around me. I did some empirical research and noticed that people seem to be fighting for security and enough to live a normal life. The goals are deeply understandable, as a life without security is unstable; hence, it makes sense to orient ourselves around survival.

Some goals answer how to live, while others try to answer why to live. Those goals answer the first question. But what about the second one? If the main thing worth fighting for is basic stability, and I'm daydreaming about having all those checked, then I can't treat survival as the ultimate reason, as it no longer explains enough.

If the purpose of money is simply to keep me alive and stable, then after that is already achieved, I am forced to ask what money is for beyond maintenance. If comfort is the destination, then what remains after comfort?

This is kind of where the usual script starts to fail. And disclaimer: this is not a contempt towards people who seek stability. I feel the problem is philosophical, not emotional. The question is not whether survival matters. The question is whether survival is enough to serve as a final meaning. This is where I feel life becomes a search for justification.

Happiness didn't feel like a final answer

The script gives people a sequence to follow (study, work, earn, & enjoy); hence, reducing uncertainty. In such a sense, it is socially useful. It also gives immediate reasons to keep going. If one lacks stability, then stability feels meaningful. If one lacks comfort, then comfort feels meaningful. If one lacks safety, then safety feels meaningful. Therefore, it is a shared belief that these goals are concrete.

I noticed that a goal can feel powerful because of its urgency (without being ultimate). I felt that it only tells me how to remain functional but does not yet tell me what deserves the rest of my years.

Then, maybe life is just about being happy? If suffering is bad, then reducing suffering seems good. If joy is good, then pursuing joy seems reasonable. So happiness is not a bad candidate (in some ways, it is the most natural). Happiness is immediate, understandable, and doesn't need complicated philosophy to feel its appeal. But another question followed: why should happiness be the final standard?

It is one thing to say happiness is good and another thing to say it is the governing purpose of life. It seems to assume more than it explains. Suppose it is the highest goal, then the judgment is mainly on how enjoyable it feels & how much suffering it avoids. This makes the center of life too inward.

A person may become happy as they love well, build well, & serve well; in that case, happiness is downstream. It is not the source of meaning. To me, it felt more plausible than making happiness the highest principle itself. A happy life and a meaningful life are not identical (obviously). Someone can be comfortable, amused, and satisfied, yet still seem to have lived too shallowly; on the other hand, someone can suffer greatly and yet still seem to live with depth and purpose.

Happiness may accompany meaning, but it doesn't seem to create meaning by itself. The search had to continue.

Refined vanity

Maybe life is not about feeling good but about becoming impressive. Ambition can feel noble. But what makes achievement matter in the end? Why should becoming more capable count as enough? Yet beneath that, the self may still remain the final reference point. It may still be meaningful, but only when it is in service of something beyond personal elevation.

I did not reject achievement as I still believe in becoming capable and striving for excellence seriously. But I could not make ambition itself the final answer. It felt too easy for it to collapse into a higher version of vanity. A more decorated ego is still an ego. It may sharpen a life, but it does not yet explain why a life deserves to be lived. It tells me how to rise; it does not fully tell me what rising is for.

Meaningful philanthropy

I then wonder if service started to look more promising. Maybe life gains meaning when it stops revolving around the self. Perhaps the point is to help other people live better. It felt less inward than happiness and less ego-centered than pure ambition. It seemed to point toward something larger and more respectable.

One thought that appeared in me was this: if I help others live well and later find meaning in their own lives, then perhaps I can derive part of my own meaning from that. The idea was not completely absurd. It was more like trying to understand whether meaning can travel through contribution. If my life becomes one of the causes of other meaningful lives, then perhaps that already gives my own life a serious shape.

However, I noticed that meaning cannot simply be borrowed second-hand. If I help another person flourish only because I hope their meaningful life will somehow fill the emptiness of mine, then the real question has not disappeared. In fact, it just moved one step back. Why should their flourishing matter to me in the first place? If that question remains unanswered, then philanthropy becomes psychologically useful but philosophically incomplete.

Then, I refined the thought that philanthropy should be meaningful only if human flourishing matters in itself. Not merely because it lets me participate in a story, but because it is genuinely good that conscious lives go better rather than worse. I believe that difference is real (and morally serious).

If that is granted, philanthropy becomes more than charity. It becomes direct participation in the good. Not borrowed meaning, but direct meaning. If flourishing matters in itself, then helping create the conditions for flourishing already has the intrinsic. I do not need to "hitchhike" on the meaning of other people's lives as the meaning is already present in the act of service itself.

Confucianism

I started wondering whether the answer might lie less in happiness and more in responsibility. This made Confucianism feel relevant. Not because I was looking for something exotic, but because I was trying to understand whether meaning might come from duty.

Confucianism does not ask first, "What do I want?" It asks more about what kind of order makes human life proper? This already felt closer to my temperament than a philosophy centered on pleasure.

I found that there is something attractive in the idea that a human being should be refined, not merely entertained and satisfied. That feels more serious as duty also becomes more intelligible here. Through a more Confucian lens, duty is not merely constraint, but it is one of the ways a human life becomes ordered and meaningful.

The emphasis on role also caught my attention. Modern thought often worries that roles limit freedom (totally understandable). But I felt that roles can also give structure to responsibility. If I understand what kind of role I should play, then my life becomes less arbitrary. It gives me direction not only from my desire, but also from my fit.

Still, Confucianism did not simply end it all. I still had further questions. Why should these duties bind me in the deepest sense? Does role explain meaning? So my relation to Confucianism was not a full adoption. It was more like a recognition that a life of mission is probably closer to a life of cultivation and duty than to a life of entertainment.

Frankl

I wonder if meaning is strongest not when I ask what I want from life, but when I ask what life asks from me. I read some Frankl books, and I like how he frames life meaning in terms of responsibility. He pushes on what is required of me, what task is mine, what suffering can I justify through a reason? If pleasure asks what feels good, then responsibility asks what deserves response.

This matters change the center of life. Under a pleasure-centered view, discomfort is mostly a problem. Under a responsibility-centered view, discomfort may become part of the path. If a task is worthy enough, then hardship does not count against it. The things people most deeply respect are often not the easiest ones (felt truer).

Frankl also helped explain something I had been sensing already. A person can survive pleasurelessly yet meaningfully, and a person can also enjoy many pleasures yet remain empty. So pleasure cannot be the decisive criterion. Meaning seems to have a different logic. It has to do with direction, responsibility, and the ability to bear suffering without ing into nihilism.

This helped me feel the strength of a mission rather than pleasure. It organizes time instead of making it episodic. It gives direction instead of a momentary satisfactory. It gives justification for enduring pains instead of softening them.

Camus

But even after all that, another question remains. What if the universe itself does not supply a final answer? Camus takes the absurd seriously. He takes it between the human need for meaning and a world that does not clearly provide it.

This hits closer as I am asking for something that could justify a life not asking only for local goals. The view of not having an easy thought: what if no such final justification is given from outside?

The absurd is not treated as an excuse for collapse. It becomes a condition under which one must still choose how to live. The response he gestures toward is often defiance. Lucidity. Refusal to lie. Refusal of fake consolations. Continuing anyway.

There is something admirable here. It preserves dignity without even a guarantee of metaphysical comfort. It says that even if the universe is silent, a person may still live consciously and rebelliously.

And yet I still had to ask whether defiance is enough. Defiance against what? Toward what end? I am not yet convinced it is enough to tell a person what to live for.

Wealth as an instrument

At first glance, wealth often looks like one of the main goals people chase. It promises security and comfort (and freedom from many forms of pressure). So it is understandable why it becomes such a strong object of desire. But once survival and comfort are no longer the deepest question, the goal of wealth should be reevaluated.

To me, wealth clearly matters. It changes what a person can influence. It extends reach. So the issue is not whether wealth has value. The issue is what kind of value it has.

I believe some missions require leverage. Good intentions without capability can remain too small. If I want to influence real outcomes, then resources matter. Capital matters. Networks matter. Wealth may not be the meaning, but it becomes one of the strongest multipliers effect of what the meaning can do.

This is where the distinction became clearer for me. Wealth is not an end; it is an instrument. It is not the object of devotion. It is a tool that expands the scale at which devotion can operate. Wealth is something to direct.

Wasted human potential as a moral problem

If I say I want leverage, then leverage toward what? This is where my attention keeps returning to one thing in particular: the waste of human potential.

I do not mean human potential in a vague motivational sense, I mean something much more concrete. A person may have ability and intelligence, yet still remain unable to become what they could have been. Not because they lacked substance, but because they lacked the right environment at the right time. When that happens, something real is lost. It's an opportunity cost as it ignores how often excellence fails to emerge because it was never properly cultivated. If that is true, then it is morally significant.

The difference between what a person could become and what they are forced to remain is not trivial. A life cut short by preventable deprivation is not just statistically worse. It is a damaged possibility. Not every unrealized possibility is an injustice, but many are, especially when it comes from remediable conditions rather than necessity.

This matters even more when the wasted potential could have compounded outward. One flourishing person does not affect only one life, but they also become a node of further flourishing. They raise standards for others. So when real potential is wasted, the loss is not merely private.

This is why I keep being drawn not only to charity in the narrow sense, but to mechanisms that unlock capability. It is an intervention against moral waste.

My current life charter

By this point, a few things have become clearer to me. Survival is not enough. Happiness is not enough. Achievement is not enough. Even service becomes fully meaningful only if flourishing matters in itself. Duty matters. Responsibility matters. Wealth matters, but as an instrument. The waste of human potential looks morally serious. So the remaining question is no longer purely theoretical. What kind of life follows from all of this?

As of now, the strongest formulation I have is this: I want to build capability, wealth, and influence, not as achievement, but as leverage. Leverage for what? To unlock overlooked human potential. To reduce the waste created when talented, serious, or promising people are trapped by lack of access.

This matters to me because it turns many separate things into one coherent direction. Ambition is no longer merely self-elevation. Wealth is no longer merely accumulation. Each of them can be subordinated to a common end. That makes them feel cleaner. Harder, perhaps, but cleaner.

The phrase "life charter" feels appropriate because I mean a governing direction. Kind of a compass to me. Something capable of deciding what belongs in my life and what does not. If a project increases my ability to unlock human potential at scale, then it has a claim on me. If it only flatters my ego or decorates my comfort, then I should be suspicious of it.

This also gives me a way to understand my relationship with success. I do still want to become capable. I do still want to build wealth. I do still want to become effective. But those wants feel less embarrassing when they are no longer final. They are easier to respect when they become tools of responsibility rather than trophies of identity.

I do not know whether I possess a final metaphysical proof of meaning. Maybe I do not. But I do know for sure that I do not need to remain directionless while waiting for perfect certainty. It is enough, at least for now, that I have found a mission serious enough to deserve the rest of my years.

I think the spine is already there.

And perhaps this is the most important distinction for me right now. I do not want a life that is merely successful. I want a life that is properly aimed. Comfort without aim is just prolonged maintenance. Even intelligence without aim can become wasted motion. So what matters is whether what I build stands in the right relation to the good I claim to serve.

If that is true, then maybe the earlier years should not be called wasted too quickly. They may have been insufficiently directed, but they were also part of arriving here.

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appendix

appendix

appendix

archive

BIO1001-General-Biology

bonus

bonus

bucketsort

CHM1001-General-Chemistry

collections

Competitive-Programming

components

cpu

CSC1001-Introduction-to-Computer-Science-Programming-Methodology

CSC1002-Computational-Laboratory

CSC3001-Discrete-Mathematics

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CSC3002-Introduction-to-Computer-Science-Programming-Paradigms

CSC3050-Computer-Architecture

CSC3050-Project-1-assembler

CSC3050-Project-2-simulator

CSC3050-Project-3-verilog

CSC3050-Project-4-CPU

CSC3100-Data-Structures

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