This was one of the first few entries I wrote in 2023 after completing “Reasons to stay alive”. After realising that finding more reasons to be alive can itself be a reason to be alive, I began to wonder about the meaning of our existence in this world.

I was a university student who studied philosophy, and existentialism was one subject that I enjoyed (my favourite was phenomenology, by the way).  However, with the experience of working as an academic statistician, I started to attribute more weight to my lived experiences when compared to philosophical conceptions of my existence.

My conclusion was similar to the conclusion I got from “Reasons to stay alive”. Understanding our very existence is an essential part of who we are. We do not have to limit ourselves to our current understanding of who we are. We can be open to learning something new about ourselves from each experience, individually or collectively.