Whenever I had ideas about the world or a thing I wanted to do, I would quickly disregard them saying that it’s not objectively valuable, so I need something better, stronger, more meaningful, etc.

Then after a few years of continuous spiraling, I asked this simple question: “Is there anything objectively valuable?”

This led me through a chain of thoughts coming after each other, that eventually resulted in this experiment:

Imagine you are the only living organism in the universe. Just a single human, on this huge planet, that at the same time is tiny in the context of galaxies, universe, etc. And the point is, try to accept that this is the reality, not like this is some kind of a trick and someone else is hiding behind the next rock with a camera. No, you are the only living organism. Now… Is there anything you want to do? You might get hungry, want to drink water, etc. But is there anything that you can do that is meaningful for you? Do you want to do math? Physics research? Chemistry? You might want to satisfy some personal needs or interests, but what’s the point of it?…

This was a hard question for me and the feeling was that I finally hit the ground of the ocean of questions and no matter what answer I come up with, I’ll build the rest on top of this.

My answer became that, no, there is nothing worth doing that is objectively valuable. My religious friends won’t agree with me on this whole experiment, as this concept in some way might be conflicting with some religious ideas, so sorry for that.

But what this meant for me is that the whole definition of objective value makes it impossible and I have been pursuing a non-existent target for a while.

This became the first answer that I could accept and not continuously question.

Now, after this, the remaining concepts started building up. So, objectively everything is meaningless. Then, the whole definition of value and meaning is no longer objective, but rather these are concepts bound to the definition of society and other people and living organisms. Hence I need to find value and meaning that is related to the construct of society, rather than outside of it. Now, this became the bottom of the questions tree, not really nodes in it, but rather the soil/ground where the tree stands. After this, the whole whys tree was built.