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The Only Purpose of Life Is to Become the Person You Want to Be

I had to get completely drunk to figure that out.

Serge Faldin
7 min readAug 24, 2020
Photo by John Arano on Unsplash

I’ve spent a lot of my teenage years searching for purpose. I read books, asked successful people via interviews, immersed myself in ancient philosophies, like Stoicism, to answer that one question: What’s the purpose of it all?

After all, we’re given 30,000 (and that’s if we’re lucky), and then that’s it. Objectively, life is meaningless. But then, nothing in life is objective. It’s all subjective because life is there to be experienced.

Hence, a better question to ask would be, “What meaning should we give life?”

Is it an achievement? I’ve tried it. It just doesn’t fill me up.

Is it money? Again — I am not motivated financially.

But I know people who don’t care about meaning. They can just live. I envy them. I guess some people are bothered by existential questions more than others.

It wasn’t until I came back home — that is, my hometown of Moscow — that I think I found the answer.

The thing is, every time I come back home, I turn 16. Not in the literal sense — I am still in my early twenties — but in the psychological sense, I am tempted to resort to the old habits of…

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Serge Faldin
Serge Faldin

Written by Serge Faldin

Honest thoughts. Unpopular opinions. Not necessarily true or smart. | Bylines: The Guardian, Truthout, Meduza, Prospect | Personal essays: sergeys.substack.com

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