thought exploration
Oct 10, 2026
Through pop culture and media we've arrived at "there isn't one, it's what you make of it". This post is about what my life isn't for and what meaning I'm attaching to my life. I'm writing this because I'm wandering around without articulating what is meaningful to me. I hope to update this once in a while.
What does my life mean to me?
Currently? Just whatever feels right/pleasurable to me. I go about thing to thing, person to person, headspace to headspace with no regard for where I'm heading. My work/ design practice, although important, where I choose to spend this important skill is ok. It would be nice if I spent it on something important. But more important= more responsibility = less money which I don't think I want. I want more money and less important job so I can breathe, rebuild my relationship with my job and make it easier for me. But I will take up important jobs here and there, love people around and take care of everything else that I can. Including myself.
But it cannot be this way forever. I hope the golden shackles come off one day and I do hope to do good things for lesser money and leave having impacted real lives. Maybe in education, maybe in politics, maybe making this city more fun, cheap and less traffic-y. I would like to work on making everything more accessible - food, water, shelter and public spaces for people to exist and meet people.
Another important problem is perhaps rehabilitating the current youth - rape culture is rampant and is currently the biggest barrier for us to see other as humans (it goes both ways here - men see women as objects to mould for their pleasure and women see men as an oppressor and someone to be feared and/or put on a pedestal) and the system incentivises that behaviour making things worse, what kind of incremental changes to the system can we do to change this? All these are important and interesting problems to solve. I might be lessening the emotional weight of the problems by putting this way. But they need to be seen as systems that exist in an environment that you can pull levers on to change. For ex : employment for everyone & having enough money to have good food and own a home means that privileged men will not see other privileged women with jobs as (she's here due to DEI) "they're taking a job that's rightfully mine" and they won't care what reservation category "stole" their seat because everybody has enough. Now, it doesn't remove the violence they will eventually impinge on these oppressed people, but they will put in rooms with more of everyone in the room together and that will already be better than what we currently have. But you see what I mean, levers to pull to improve one thing at a time? I'd probably love to simulate a data viz to see where things can be levers to see how populations' behaviour changes with it.
Another line of interest is, how can I make sure the access I had to jump classes also exist for someone else?
From all things mentioned above - what that tells me about myself - systems problems interest me :) and public good interests me.
I also know I'm much much happier when my friends who love me for who I am and I have interesting conversations when they are around. As much as systemic change is important, so is my tiny circle that I stay safe in and get safely questioned in. It gives my life a meaning
Now evaluating what in life doesn't hold meaning for me. This one is harder to write than the one above. Maybe I can think about what I did think my meaning of life was. Now that I think of kid santrupti - love was her religion, she was an atheist from a young age. And constantly relied on fantasies of love to get by, knowing somebody somewhere would rescue her helped her get by. Even the only time she was religious, it was with krishna who's known to be a playboy. Ya, no more of that. Love has saved me in a way, love towards myself, love by my friends and love that people have shown me towards the work I do. It has saved me from hurtful words, painful situations and general life's trials and tribulations. I still had to live through them, but i did actually live through them and not just dissociate through them. So no religion, no fantastical romantic lover + saviours. I also really loved imagining having an illustrious career, I loved making youtube videos as a kid and I loved the thought of going viral. I have done that in small doses now and it is scary, going viral almost always means that there will be mean people. And I'm glad I don't have a YouTube career (not that design is any less critical, but the critique is at least contextual) So virality and being remembered is no more useful to me.
TLDR :
What makes my life Meaningful right now:
What is not meaningful anymore
So, what is meaningful to you?