Existential Pursuits

In Empty Hands

I’ve spent much of my life answering and revising these two questions:

“Who do I want to be?” “What do I really want?”

They are important questions. They shape ambition, values, and direction. They help construct a personally meaningful life. But neither is the most important question. It took me years to even consider the possibility of combining them, but this is what it looks like:

“What kind of person do I want to be, even if I never get what I want?”

This is the question that reveals who you are when life stops cooperating. What you hold close when everything else fights back. Who you want to be regardless of outcome. What kind of life you truly want to build.

Empty Always

In the previous entry, Can’t Have It All, the premise was simple: choice is inevitable. No path gives you everything. Every path has a price. Wanting everything is just another way of avoiding commitment.

But what happens when you do choose? When you take the difficult path, make the necessary sacrifices, learn many lessons, and still don’t get what you want? No payoff, no triumph, not even a fair sense of justice. You tried, over and over, and only ever failed.

If your identity is built solely on achievement, what’s left if they slip permanently out of reach? If your purpose depends on being seen, loved, recognized, or at least the proof that you’re growing, what do you do if it just consistently doesn’t work?

This is where most philosophies collapse. They teach you how to dream, strive, manifest, achieve. But they don’t teach you how to endure the permanent absence of what you desire. I’m not going to tell you that the Codex will fix all of your problems, because it won’t. This is one of those things you just have to learn to live with.

We like to imagine our desires as expressions of our inner truth. But often, they’re just guesses. Hopes. Versions of ourselves we think will solve everything once we arrive. But desire itself is not sacred. It’s not always wise. It’s often informed by exposure, envy, fantasy, or a narrow slice of possible realities. Wanting something doesn’t make it good. Getting it doesn’t make it right.

The point isn’t to demonize desire, but to understand that desire is fragile, and meaning is not meant to rely on something that is unstable. There is a difference between what is important to you and what you desire. The longer you live, the more you’ll encounter loss. Not just of things you never had, but of things you fought for. Things that should have worked. Things that made perfect sense. And the ones who remain sane, grounded, even fulfilled, are not always the ones who win, but the ones who decided in advance what not getting it would turn them into.

Things don’t always work out just because you did everything you could. The relationship doesn’t last or even happen despite all your cooperation. The opportunity turns you down even though you prepared plenty for it. Your health fails despite all your effort to take care of it. Your art never gets recognition despite how much soul you poured into it. The people you love don’t care about you for reasons you don’t understand. The world rewards the shallow, loud, or cruel over your depth, integrity, and compassion. And your effort goes unrewarded for so long that you start wondering if you were just delusional the whole time.

The most frustrating part of happiness and meaning is that the two are not directly intertwined. They are between passions, between mirrors, and shaped as much by what you don’t control as what you do. You can be grateful without being fulfilled. And you can be satisfied while still hungering for more. You can’t have it all, and sometimes you can’t have it at all.

This is where people can start to lose themselves, speaking from experience. They become bitter, hard, distant, cynical. They withdraw their sincerity because it seems nobody can take it seriously. They overrely on strength and reason because it becomes the only thing they can trust. They treat the world with the same cold indifference it seemed to show them. They fight against the world with the same passion they once used to pursue it. And they spend every waking moment clawing for answers. Maybe they even write a Codex.

This resentment is not due to failure alone. It is the consistent, repeatable, and never-ending failure despite constant adaptation that makes a man lose his sanity.

There is no end to this frustration. Every decision has trade-offs and every path comes with compromises. Some things you just can’t change no matter how hard you try, and some things you just can’t obtain because it means sacrificing something that matters more. But there is something else you can do.

What does it mean to be the kind of person who continues anyway? Not because it will eventually pay off. Not because “everything happens for a reason.” Not because hope is inherently virtuous. But because that’s who you’ve decided to be.

Whole Anyway

Who are you when nothing comes of it? When no one thanks you. When no one notices. When no one understands. When no one reads your work. When no one returns your kindness. When none of your effort is visible. When your dreams die in your hands. When your love is refused again and again.

Do you become cruel? Do you become numb? Do you turn on yourself? Or do you grow into someone who no longer lives by transactions?

Someone who offers what they can because they refuse to become a version of themselves they wouldn’t respect, even in private. Someone who builds character not to “attract better things,” but because they’ve decided that their character is the thing.

This requires that you build a self not based on what you earn, but the principles you keep.

You don’t do this because it makes you happy. You do this because it makes you whole. And wholeness doesn’t always feel good. But it does feel true.

Happiness matters. Fulfillment matters. Desire matters. But they are all impermanent and always changing. At some point, life will put you on the wrong end of fortune. And when it does, what matters to you must become stronger than your disappointment for not having it.

In empty hands, how will you respond? With bitterness? With distance? With delusion? Or do you stay true to who you want to be despite the emptiness?

Your character is the one thing you carry even when everything else is taken. Take it seriously.