There comes a time in everyone’s life when they realize their lifespans—when compared to the great, yawing expanse of time immemorial and its unimaginable end—are but a nanosecond, a blip, a nothing burger trapped between infinite buns.

I was a 13-year-old aspiring Petaluma punk when this occurred to me. Some time-lord weirdo had inscribed a cosmic proviso with model airplane paint onto the fender of their car. It went something like: “If you divide the time you are alive by the time that came before you and and the time that will come after, are you really alive at all?”

Gulp. I’m not good at math and was less so at 13, but my back of the envelope conclusion was “Um, no.” Theretofore, my philosophical ruminations strayed no further than the questions I may ask myself courtesy of the Talking Heads’ “Once in a Lifetime” video on the MTV. 

It wasn’t until Dead Poets Society that I acquired the script-flipping vocabulary of “carpe diem,” which inspired a relatively reckless lifestyle with enough days seized to create the alternative time line I’ve lived in since. Which is another way of saying, I’m too old for this shit. This man’s search for meaning has come to naught. Be assured, I’m not pulling a St. Augustine (the “buy now, pay later” plan of late in life reform) but I’ve concluded that searching for meaning in an era of abject absurdity is like coming in late to Waiting for Godot and whispering to your seat-mate, “Wha’d I miss?” Everything and nothing.

The answer instead, I submit, is to instead seek purpose. Not even a higher purpose. Maybe just a lower purpose. If Meaning wants a cathedral, Purpose is fine with a folding chair.

Go for something reasonable and within one’s actual grasp. For example, my purpose is surely more than running down the clock on “legacy media” (a phrase that sounds less like an industry than a diagnosis). But there’s something to be said for showing up, week in and out, and putting a few hundred words of fairly cogent English in a row to elicit the sensation of something meaningful. Make that purposeful. I did this on purpose, I swear.

At 13, I thought the point was to answer the universe. On the eve of 54, I’m reasonably pleased when I answer an email. This is not defeat but evolution. One begins with infinity and ends up on deadline and the brief hallucination that these sentences matter because somebody, somewhere, has read them.

Same as it ever was.

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