October 25, 2025
From a tweet: What is life? • Dostoevsky: It’s hell. • Socrates: It’s a test. • Aristotle: It’s the mind. • Nietzsche: It’s power. • Freud: It’s death. • Marx: It’s the idea. • Picasso: It’s art. • Gandhi: It’s love. • Schopenhauer: It’s suffering. • Bertrand Russell: It’s competition. • Steve Jobs: It’s faith. • Einstein: It’s knowledge. • Stephen Hawking: It’s hope. • Kafka: It’s just the beginning.
My take: Life is whatever you choose it to be. It can be all of this, none of this, or some of this - it’s up to to each of us to decide.
The most powerful takeaway from David Foster Wallace’s This is Water commencement speech is that we can all construct meaning from experience in unique ways. The answer to, what is life, is at its core how we assign meaning to reality, to existence.
The beauty of life, to me, is that we are the authors of that answer. Figuring it out, one day at a time.