What is life? Nothing.

‘What is life? Nothing.’

That’s the answer I got from my grandmother today.

She was talking to me about her recent phone call with a family member who’s the same age as her who has dementia. Let’s call this person Sarah.

Sarah is bed bound and in a care home. My grandma facetimed her today and the only thing Sarah said was ‘take me home. Tell my son to take me home.’

My grandmother broke down.

Here’s someone the same age as her who has been with her in this family for 50 years and she’s watching her slowly suffer and deteriorate into death.

It’s heartbreaking for old people.

She was thinking today ‘what is life?’ And her answer was nothing. Eventually we’re all going to die so what does this mean anyway?

I pushed back.

To me life is both everything and nothing.

As Gandhi said ‘Whatever you do in life will be insignificant but it’s very important you do it.’

Yes, she’s right in the grand scheme of things.

Each individual life is meaningless. We don’t mean anything in the universe. We exist for up to 80-100 years on this planet, which is one part of a solar system in a universe with an infinite number of solar systems. Life existed before we got here and it will exist long after we leave.

Naval described it great on Joe Rogan’s podcast when he said the following:

‘You’re born, you have a whole set of sensory experiences and simulations and colours and sounds, and then you die. How you choose to interpret that is up to you. You do have that choice.’

Those last lines are the most powerful.

It’s up to you.

How you interpret life is entirely up to how you see the world.

To most people, their life is everything. 

The world is only how they see it.

They don’t understand how much bigger it is than they imagine. They can’t comprehend how people can live and grow up in vastly different circumstances to what they’ve experienced. They can’t put themselves in other people’s shoes because they’ve never been there.

If they’re born rich, they don’t know what it’s like to be poor. They don’t know what it’s like to go hungry or not have a home to go to. They only know luxury, yachts and expensive vacations where people around them can afford anything and everything.

Those people’s interpretations of the world are vastly different from the majority of people’s interpretation of the world. Most people are living paycheck to paycheck barely hanging on.

But life should be everything because it’s filled with infinite possibility.

You have the power to determine where you go.

Stop listening to the noise of the news, social media and the people around you complaining how you can’t do it.

You can do it.

So how do you figure out the meaning of life?

It starts within.

You need to understand your brain.

You need to understand how you think. Why do you think the way you think? Why do you believe what you believe?

Once you understand that every thought in your head was put there by someone else, your brain opens up.

How did I figure it out?

Meditation.

Meditating forces you to confront your own thoughts and analyze your mind.

It forces you to take a step back from everything and look at it objectively. Let things go by. Recognize that thoughts are just thoughts, nothing else. You don’t have to act on them. You don’t have to believe them. You can just let them go by.

Meditation is hard because you don’t see progress. It won’t happen overnight. In fact it won’t happen for years.

But there will be a moment in time where everything clicks. Everything makes sense. The world looks a lot clearer. You begin to understand your place in the world.

Life is up to you. It’s how you make it.

Yes, circumstances may have put you at a major disadvantage compared to others, but now you have the Internet. People have access to unlimited amounts of information where you can learn anything you want.

The problem is the desire to learn is scarce.

Develop that.

Follow your curiosities.

Pursue the biggest questions in life and figure out what they mean to you.

My meaning of life is very different from someone else’s meaning of life.

Mine today is to make an impact on the world that outlasts my life. It’s to push people beyond their wildest dreams. It’s to inspire people to pursue the things they love while doing good in the world.

So no daddi, life is not nothing.

It may seem like that in the dark days when nothing is going right and you’re watching your world crumble around you, but it doesn’t have to be like that.

You get to decide what it means to you.

So go figure out your answer to ‘what is life?’