Uncovering the Life of Your Dreams

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From where I spent most of my time—which was sitting at a desk next to a large, metal-framed window in my third-floor office at DM Realty—the streets of New York looked like a scene out of an old storybook. It wasn't always a pleasant scene, but the distraction of staring at the constant activity below helped to take my mind off my empty life.

For as long as I could remember, I had been searching for some answers to make sense of it all. There were many questions to which I wanted the answers, yet every time I thought about my life, I found myself constantly returning to one question in particular: Is this all there is?

One afternoon in late fall, while staring out the window of my office and contemplating that question, I gave up on finding the answer. I can't explain why it happened then. All I know is that I came to the conclusion that there was no satisfying answer—no purpose to or meaning for my life. No purpose for anyone else's, either. Nothing more than this.

I decided to stop trying to figure it out and admitted to myself that my search for answers was simply an exercise to assuage my fear that life was meaningless. At that moment of resignation, I decided to accept that life was just a random, mathematical, and biological evolutionary process. A miracle, of course, that it could happen, but a meaninglessness miracle, nevertheless.

One might think that finally coming to any conclusion would bring some level of relief. Instead, the only thing I sensed was loss that ...