What I mainly find interesting about this short book by Mark Manson is his view on what is meaningful. I think everyone wants to do something meaningful, but to answer what is meaningful is hard.
In his eyes, there are two things that are meaningful.
- Solving problems
- Helping others
Why?
By solving problems and helping others, if you died, then someone is better off because you lived. Otherwise, our pure existence didn’t have any purpose and was useless.
I also found interesting how he connected this to the meaninglessness of humanity. Many people talk about being impactful and wanting to change the world and live forever by being remembered. However, each human is so small and impactless on this earth, and its long history. In millions of years, who will still be remembered?
If then you start to zoom out further, you realize even the sun, which is so big to us, is just one of billions of stars in our galaxy. And this galaxy is only one of billions of galaxies in this universe. And probably, even this universe is only one of billions of universes.
If you look at this, we humans and our actions are so little in this big world. However, his simple answer is still viable because even if we die and will be forgotten soon, someone else was better off because we lived and did the things we did.