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Life Makes Its Own Meaning
Nature abhors emptiness. In my 20s, so did I.
I needed my life to matter — to have capital-M Meaning. Eating, sleeping, working, and dying wasn’t enough. Time is short. When I thought about the prospect of having squandered it, the horror and disgust made me shake. I couldn’t allow myself to live like those other people, who passed through the world without transforming it. They had no special, transcendent purpose. Did I?
So, I became a Marxist. I don’t know whether I ever quite convinced myself that the worker’s revolution was going to literally, physically happen. Honestly, I never even entirely stopped feeling a twinge of disbelief whenever someone else said they were a socialist, too. When I first embraced leftism, no one I knew shared my ideas. On some level, that was part of the appeal. But emotionally, I needed the revolution to be real. It had to be solid — something I could hope for, not just fantasize about. So I disciplined my skeptical gut feelings into line.
But the mass revolutionary upsurge was somehow always only a few more years away. The movement was perpetually just about to enter its most crucial phase in a generation. (No outburst of protest was itself the big one, but each of them got to point towards the next — a chain of John the Baptists, endlessly preparing the way for each other. Black Lives Matter 2020 was…