What I Was Made For
Is it enough...
Some mornings I wake up, and the world feels impossibly small.
Not small like confined. Small like precious. Like I could hold it all in my hands if I just knew how to cup them right.
I spent ten years at Google teaching machines to understand language. Computational linguistics. Patterns in text. Meaning extracted from chaos. it was good.
but one day I realized I had no idea what any of it meant.
Not the work. The work made sense. Sort of. I mean me. What I meant. What I was for.
The Questions
There’s this moment that keeps happening to … I think everybody some day or another.
The substantial questioning. The existential questioning.
I’m writing a blog post about some AI tool, or debugging code, or watching the kids at the daycare discover that water makes sand stick together. And everything stops.
Not stops like breaks. Stops like opens up. You know what I mean? These “big picture” moments…
But what is the answer? Or answers? Might be no. Might be yes. Don’t know what’s more terrifying.
That this ordinary, unremarkable Tuesday afternoon might contain everything I was looking for. That purpose isn’t somewhere else. It’s here. It’s now. And I’m not paying enough attention.
What I Get Wrong… All the Time
We think existential crisis means something’s broken. That we’ve lost our way. That we need to find ourselves like we’re car keys we misplaced.
But what if the crisis is the point?
What if we’re supposed to wake up sometimes and feel the weight of being alive? To stand at the edge of our own existence and feel dizzy with the impossibility of it all?
I spent years building systems to process meaning. Didn’t ask for it. Life just brought me there. Breaking language down into components. Subject, verb, object. Syntax trees. Semantic relations. Clean. Logical. Understandable. What I naturally enjoyed… well, enjoyed isn’t the right word… what I was good at, naturally good at.
And none of it prepared me for the messy, illogical beauty of actually being something. Of mattering in ways I can’t quantify.
The Daycare Question
My wife runs a children daycare. I actually have the certificate myself. And I have a handful of my own kids. And kids are something special, something unique.
They ask things. Like…
“Why is the sky blue?” “Where do thoughts come from?” “What happens when we die?”
And I could give them the answers, sometimes. The wavelengths of light. The neural pathways. The biological facts about decomposition.
But other times… they just blow my mind with their questions.
But they’re not really asking about physics or biology. They’re asking the same thing I’m asking. They’re asking: What does it mean to be here?
Sometimes I tell them: “I don’t know. Isn’t that amazing?”
Their faces light up. Because not knowing is somehow part of the progress… isn’t it?
What I Was Made For
I don’t think we were made for one thing.
I think we were made to keep asking. To keep searching. To wake up on random Wednesdays and feel the whole universe pressing against our ribs.
I write code that might help someone build something beautiful. Or not.
I write blog posts that might shift how someone thinks. Or not. Most of the time… not.
I see parents understand their children. I watch kids discover that they can create things that weren’t there before.
None of it is the answer. All of it is the answer.
The Beautiful Part
The existential crisis isn’t the problem, I think.
The crisis is waking up and thinking we have a crisis. It’s remembering that we’re alive. We have obligations, so many things to do, so many problems to solve…. But we need to pause.
We need to remember that we get to mean something, even if we’re not sure what. Or why. Or how.
My job taught me how to find patterns. But much of my live around it taught me how not to.
The things I build will eventually stop working. The blog posts will get buried in search results. The kids I care for will grow up and be independent. Everything ends.
Everything…
And that makes it matter more right now. Right?
The Bottom Line
We were made for this uncertainty. Aren’t we?
This beautiful, terrifying not-knowing. We were made to wake up and wonder. To create things that matter even though we can’t prove they matter. To love people and projects and moments that will all disappear.
We were made to be here, now, asking these questions. To feel small and infinite at the same time.
That’s enough. That’s a lot.
Maybe we were made for exactly this.