The Meaning of Your Life

The Meaning of Your Life

A repairman who never fixed his own sink

Marc is 32, exactly the kind of person magazines like to put on the page. College degree, hard worker, athletic, eats clean. Data analyst at a large company. He pulled himself up alone — parents divorced early, poor childhood — and yet here he is, financially stable. On paper, all good.

Then one evening he goes on a date with a woman from an app. Over dinner she mentions her kitchen garbage disposal is jammed. Marc drives over that night and fixes it. It's late when he gets home, but something has stirred in him. For weeks he chews on the feeling that washed over him when she thanked him. What made him happy wasn't being a repairman for an evening — it was being needed by someone.

A year later, Marc's own disposal jams. It doesn't even occur to him to fix it. He stands in the kitchen, stares at the drain, and thinks how empty everything feels. Fifty dates later, still nobody in his life. He works from home; his coworkers are Zoom tiles. He often goes days without speaking to anyone in person. He listens to podcasts of other people talking. He whispers a phrase he made up: "social pornography."

Marc isn't sad in the traditional sense. No trauma, no money problems, no illness. And yet something fundamental is missing. Maria feels it too — 27, an engineering officer with two degrees, serving in the army. When asked what she'd like a year from now, she can't answer for minutes. Then quietly: "What if I never find the answers? Or what if there aren't any?" Paul feels it too — a 47-year-old professor who says his life is like a factory, indifferently churning out days he's obliged to consume. Ten years ago he proudly wrote academic books and cared who read them. Today they feel "pointless." Evenings, he numbs himself by scrolling social media.