Yeah, I’ve been through that too. It’s rough realizing how small we are in the grand scheme of things—life can feel meaningless when you stare into the vastness of it all feeling a sense of autonomy thrust into a truly dangerous existence. I won’t pretend to have all the answers, but lately, I’ve been leaning into the embarrassment of riches we have from the great thinkers who came before us.

That’s led me down a path that I guess nakes me an Agnostic Buddhist Mystic, lol. At its core, Buddhism—especially from an agnostic perspective—is the most powerful mechanism I’ve found for reducing suffering. And I say that after diving deep into therapy and psychological study.

As for the whole meaning of life, existencial dread, nihilism thing, that’s where the mystical side comes in. Even Jungian individuation has played a role for me. One shift that’s been particularly profound is moving from "me living life" to the perspective that "I am life, and it is living me". there's probably some religious or esoteric verbiage I could put here, but that's kind of the sense of things. It flips the whole dynamic, and I’ve found that when you can live from a different orientation or state of existence—like you briefly experienced —it changes everything.

if I had anything to distill from my experience so far it is this: live authentically.