This is not an argument backed by data or philosophy textbooks. What follows is nothing more than personal observation, a simple record of what I went through while trying to locate meaning in my own life.

Let’s start at the beginning. "Everything changed when the Fire Nation attacked"

That was a joke. You may laugh now.

Like most people, I first went searching for meaning the fastest and easiest way available: religion. It came prepackaged with answers, structure, and a promise that suffering had a reason. I moved through its phases: belief, spirituality, devotion, and eventually fanaticism. And after exhausting every variation of faith I could inhabit honestly, I arrived at a simple conclusion: there is no imaginary sky dosa orbiting planet Mojo that requires my absolute worship to keep the universe running, Thanks to modern science and the internet.

So what happens next?

Earlier, life came with a prebuilt purpose. Death wasn’t an ending, it was a transfer. I would die and wake up in every stone age man's wet dream, wine flowing freely, justice finally enforced, all Heretics given a shawarma treatment and existence redeemed by eternal meaning in my harem.

Now that even GTA 6 has been confirmed real, humanity’s oldest fantasy finally materializing. The afterlife feels noticeably absent. And with it, so does purpose.

To replace that missing structure, I turned to distractions. work, entertainment, ambition, noise. I stayed busy, productive even, given my ADHD. But distraction, no matter how refined, has a shelf life. Once the stimulation fades, the emptiness returns unchanged and unimpressed.

Then came the part, religion had quietly protected me from: death.

Not the poetic version but the literal one. When you die, you don’t transition. You simply stop existing, no sound, no sensation or awareness. Just a body that decays, feeds worms, collapses into bone, and eventually leaves nothing worth naming.

This is where existentialism enters the room as the antihero confronting his sins, in my case the sin was, I became too self aware. This new found fear isn’t of punishment or hell. It’s that when you disappear, the universe doesn’t even pause.

I couldn’t accept it. The idea that I had no predefined purpose. That I wasn’t special. That I was, functionally, an NPC easily replaced, briefly remembered, then erased. The thought that people would move on, forget my voice, my face, my opinions, unsettled something deep.

Like a blackhole crumbling on its own mass all of it came crashing down on a New Year’s night, while I was trying to explain this feeling to a friend, the quiet terror that nothing is coming to justify any of this.

For a while, I became a nihilist. What even is life? If there’s no purpose, why should I even enjoy my Sunday biryani or my December storm Harry Potter movie marathon?

That phase, in hindsight, was painful. When I look back, I cringe myself to sleep. But like every sleep, you eventually wake up.

My wake-up call came in the form of an absurd idea called… “ab...absurd hmm, what should I call it? Absurdism?”

Yeah, let’s just call it absurdism.

The idea is simple: everyone is going to die one day. So what? Let’s party at the end of everything.

Slowly, the fear of death started to disappear. While I’m here alive I should do what I’ve been doing since the moment I was born: live.

I started living. I’m not the main character of anyone’s story. Hell, there isn’t even a story. But that isn’t stopping me from living.

But is living enough? I went searching for an answer in a secret ancient text called The Comics. Somewhere between panels and speech bubbles, I stumbled into Superman and, to my surprise, started liking him.

Which made no sense.

Superman isn’t even cool like Batman. He wears his chaddi outside his pants. He’s colorful, goofy, and says the corniest lines imaginable. So why do I like Superman?

Superman is this alien who is, in almost every sense, a god. He can fly, see through walls, and at one point Superman literally moved the universe(yes, I am not kidding). The guy is absurdly overpowered.

He’s not relatable. At least, not if you’re watching him for the action.

But Superman, at heart, is just a guy trying to do good.

To his parents, he’s their son who doesn’t call every day.

To his lover, he’s this goofy guy who shows up late to dates and forgets what day of the week it is.

Despite all his flaws, he still tries to do the best he can.

If an alien printed on comic book pages can try to be good and find his humanity, then maybe my purpose is to find my own.

I stopped traffic the other day with my bike for an old lady pushing a vegetable cart, trying to cross the road on a busy Monday. Auto drivers cursed at me. A cab driver even pressed the gas and hit my bike from behind.

I stood my ground.

She crossed the road, turned around, and smiled at me.

And for a moment… I almost felt like Superman.