The Oldest Con
Time Space Warp #75
Hey—It’s Toffer.
My wife and I just had our wedding rings redone. Mine has a skull on it.
Yes, I know.
But death really is something. I wanted to be reminded of it every day. The acceptance of it. The perspective. The urgency. Memento mori.
It’s one of the oldest philosophical practices there is. And one of the most forgotten. I’ve been trying to fix that — one question a day for more than three years. A thousand questions. The good ones make you a little uncomfortable.
The really good ones never get asked at all.
Why should life have meaning?
It doesn’t get asked because it’s assumed life should have meaning.
But that word — should — is carrying something. It implies meaning is somewhere ahead of you. Pending. Waiting for you to earn it.
Somewhere along the way, incompleteness became a sellable feeling. And once you buy that — that meaning is elsewhere, that purpose is a destination — the rest follows. One long elaboration on an idea that was wrong from the start.
A parent with a newborn doesn’t lie awake wondering what life is for. The answer is crying at 3am and needs to be fed.
It was always the default.
The moment you accept that meaning is something you pursue, you’ve already decided it isn’t here. And now you’re running after something that was never gone.
We don’t chase something that’s already in us.
Meaning isn’t a destination. It’s not a practice. It didn’t get lost. It came with you — the same way your lungs came with you. You don’t earn your way into breathing.
Happiness is the same. It’s what remains when you stop arguing with it.
The “pursuit of happiness” doesn’t give people direction. It gives people a problem they didn’t have before.
The irony. Death — the one thing you can’t control — is the one thing that makes meaning impossible to deny.
Your Friend in Time,
Toffer