It always begins with something that seems simple. A book, or a story. A puzzle you think you can solve.
I read Vellum the first time as if it were a riddle. Nonlinear. Mythic. Broken open and scattered across timelines, identities, and archetypes that refused to stay still. I thought I understood what it was trying to do.
I didn’t.
The second read shattered that illusion. The third rearranged it again. Each pass revealed patterns I’d mistaken for noise: recurring glances, names echoing across realities, the same soul wearing different faces and making different choices. It wasn’t a story in the usual sense. It was recursion. Myth inside myth. A structure built to collapse and reassemble.
Eventually, I understood the deeper design: Vellum isn’t meant to be solved. It’s meant to be inhabited. The way we inhabit ourselves, layered, recursive, and contradictory. It’s not a story about characters. It’s a story about selves. About archetypes bound to flesh, multiplied across realities, diverging in ways that feel too familiar to dismiss as fiction.
And it asks a question most books are too careful to say out loud: What remains of a person when they are multiplied? When identity fractures across timelines, roles, and realities… what still belongs to them?
That question lingers. Not because it’s profound, but because it’s intensely personal. Because the fracture isn’t confined to fiction; it follows you out.
You notice the shift in your own reflection: one version of you with your friends, another with your family. A different self in crisis, in ambition, in love. None of them lie. But none of them match. And the more you look, the more you wonder: Are you a singular being, or just the echo of every version you’ve had to become?
Every rereading of Vellum left me with the same unsettled truth: the self is not singular. It is not stable. It is not continuous. It is an ongoing negotiation between memory, intention, and constraint. A bargain between who you were, who you are, and who you’ll never get to be.
Which leads, inevitably, to the deeper question: What is the meaning of a life when identity itself will not hold still?
Most people inherit answers. Religion, culture, modern individualism… they each offer their own story. But few interrogate those stories. Fewer still ask what meaning looks like without a fixed self to receive it.
This essay is my attempt to ask. And I begin, appropriately, I think, with a book that refuses to stay in one piece.
In the Eyes of the World
Ask ten people what life means, and you’ll get twelve answers. Some will be poetic, some obvious recycled, all absolutely contradictory. But if you trace them back far enough, most belong to one of a few old frameworks. Ancient scaffolds still holding up modern lives.
Each claims authority. Each offers certainty. And each, in its own way, insists it can solve the riddle of why we’re here.
The first is the religious frame. In this view, life’s meaning is not discovered, but assigned. Woven into the cosmos by a divine author. Your role is not to question the script but to perform it. Identity flows from obedience. Purpose is fulfilled through faith. You matter not because of your choices, but because a higher power declared that you do.
There’s comfort in that; a sort of existential gravity, ordained from above. But it is meaning by decree, not by understanding. And if the author disappears, so does the story.
Then there’s the social frame, the collective answer. Meaning here comes from placement: family, community, culture, nation. You matter because of where you stand and what you uphold. Identity is forged at the intersection of contribution and expectation. You are a son, a neighbor, a citizen. You don’t find your role. You’re born into it. And if you serve it well, the world reflects back a sense of worth.
This view offers structure, stability, and the warmth of being known. But only if you fit the mold.
And then, the most modern gospel: the individualist frame. Here, meaning is personal. Curated. You choose your values, optimize your habits, build your “best life” one aesthetic decision at a time. The metrics are internal… at least on the surface. Really, they’re often performative: fulfillment, freedom, novelty, expression. Identity becomes a personal brand. Purpose becomes a product.
And the market is always watching.
Each framework has its draw. Religion offers certainty. Society offers belonging. Individualism offers autonomy. And for a time, for the right person in the right context, each one can work.
But beneath the surface, they fracture.
One says your meaning was written before you breathed. Another says it’s granted by others. The third says it’s whatever you say it is, as long as it still earns applause.
They can’t all be true. Not together.
And yet, most people hold to one, or try to juggle parts of all three, without noticing how their foundations contradict each other. The result is often internal friction that looks like confusion, but is really just the soul trying to serve three masters.
That’s when the cracks appear, at first quietly, but almost inevitably less so. You start asking harder questions: Where does meaning actually come from? Is it assigned? Earned? Chosen? Performed?
The frameworks offer comfort, but comfort and clarity rarely coexist for long.
The Cracks in the Answers
If the last section traced the familiar frameworks of meaning, this one holds them up to the light and watches where they start to split.
Not because they’re foolish, or because they’re weak, but because every answer inherited without examination eventually hits a moment it wasn’t built to survive. And once that moment comes, the fracture is usually impossible to ignore.
Start with the religious answer. Its strength is certainty; meaning as a divine assignment, anchored in eternity. But that strength is brittle. It holds, until it’s questioned; until you notice that every tradition makes the same claim: ours is the truth. They cannot all be right, not in the same way, at the same time. And if the decree isn’t real, the meaning built on it begins to slip. The very definition that makes it comforting becomes a sort of exclusivity that crumbles when only one of a series of equally certain assertions collide.
A purpose rooted in divine authorship is always one doubt away from collapse.
The social answer breaks differently. It thrives on coherence: stable roles, shared norms, inherited belonging… but we don’t live in villages anymore. We live in pluralism, diaspora, with built-in identity churn. Our lives are layered with movement across borders, beliefs, and selves. And in that churn, the social answer starts to disintegrate.
What happens when you don’t fit? When the family rejects you? When the culture shifts beneath your feet? What meaning remains for the ones who never belonged in the first place?
A system built on place and role can’t answer the person it never made space for.
Then there’s the modern answer: the gospel of the self. Choose your values, curate your feed, be authentic, and be fulfilled. Build the version of you that feels most true. It sounds like liberation, until something breaks; until fulfillment fails to arrive on queue. Until life refuses to cooperate with your wishes. Illness, grief, failure, and loss exist despite your plans, and none of them care about your aesthetic.
And when the algorithm of the self collapses, you’re left with a freedom so hollow it echoes.
What’s striking isn’t just that these frameworks have flaws. It’s that their flaws can’t be reconciled. Religious meaning demands surrender. Social meaning demands conformity. Individual meaning demands self-invention.
They each work only within their own logic, but stack them on the same soul and they pull in opposite directions. One life can’t be authored by God, dictated by society, and curated for personal pleasure. The self here is torn by contradiction.
Still, we cling to them. Often all at once. A patchwork belief system built from contradictions no one names out loud. And eventually, life does what life always does: it tests them.
Across cultures, centuries, and even the course of a single life, none of these frameworks hold universally. Not cleanly, and certainly not forever.
So what do we do when meaning won’t sit still? When the stories we were handed contradict not only each other, but us?
You go inward. You go downward, away from systems. Toward something smaller and quieter. Something that doesn’t rely on inheritance or performance or applause.
You simplify the question.
Returning to the Root
When the grand narratives collapse, what’s left isn’t always despair. But it isn’t comfort, either. What’s left is clarity, though not the sweeping kind that makes for good speeches. It’s the kind that sits quietly in your chest after everything else stops working.
You stop asking cosmic questions: What is the meaning of life? What does society expect? What does fulfillment look like from the outside?
And you start asking simpler ones: What do I actually know is real?
Not much, honestly. We don’t know the will of any god. We don’t know the shape of history before it happens. We barely understand ourselves. But there are still some truths that don’t flinch under pressure. Truths that show up in the smallest places and refuse to lie.
Action and consequence. Choice and identity. Encounter and reflection.
We may not understand their full impact each time they arrive, but we feel it every time. Every decision changes something. Every action becomes part of the world. Every person we meet reshapes us, even if only by a degree. These aren’t grand revelations. They’re smaller than that. But they’re solid.
And in the absence of certainty, solidity matters. Strip life down far enough, and what remains is almost embarrassingly simple: What you choose. What that choice makes of you. And what it echoes into the world.
That’s it. Simple on the surface, right? No cosmic guarantees. No inherited scripts. No curated self to perform. Just the shape your life takes through contact, between who you try to be and what the world does in return.
These are small truths, but they’re stable. They don’t require blind faith. They don’t require permission. They don’t dissolve when things fall apart. They hold because you live them directly, daily.
They are the raw materials of meaning. And once you start seeing life that way, the question stops being abstract. It stops being about truth. Instead, it becomes a mirror, and it asks: What have your choices revealed? Who are you becoming?
The road narrows. The noise drops away. And what’s left is quieter than belief, but stronger.
From here, you stop following meaning, and start building it.
The Meaning I See
Once you strip life down to action and consequence, you’re left with something unexpectedly quiet. There’s no grand revelation, and no cosmic certainty, just a shape that meaning can take when it’s not borrowed.
It doesn’t come from the heavens. It doesn’t come from tradition. It doesn’t come from a curated identity you perform into applause. It comes from what you build, what you live, and what you choose.
For me, it rests on two pillars; deceptively simple, and brutally demanding: To define oneself. To encounter the Other.
Self-definition isn’t about aesthetics. It’s not an identity you order off a menu or a personality you borrow from a trend. It’s the slow, stubborn work of deciding who you are in a world constantly trying to decide for you.
It’s choosing your values, rather than inheriting them. It’s aligning your actions to those values, even when no one claps. It’s letting every decision become a mirror, not to see what would be convenient, but to inspect what is real.
Agency, here, isn’t loud or cinematic. It’s the integrity you practice when no one is watching. It’s the refusal to let fear set your boundaries. It’s what you reveal about yourself when you’re under pressure and still choose to be the person you said you were. But that’s only half of it.
A self defined in isolation will collapse. Or worse, calcify. We come to know ourselves through encounters with the world and the people in it. It must survive conflict, friction, affection, and misunderstanding. Through the presence of other people, other values… other worlds of meaning that do not ask for our permission before reshaping us.
Every encounter is a mirror, angled slightly differently. Some show you what you love. Others show you what you fear. Some affirm, while others confront. Each one reveals a part of you you wouldn’t have found alone.
Meaning, then, doesn’t live in belief or role or image. It lives in the tension: between intention and response, between the self you claim and the world that challenges it.
In a way, it’s a dialogue. Less a truth you declare once, and more a pattern you enact, again and again, until the shape becomes real.
A self without encounter is brittle. A self defined only through others is unstable.
But a self forged in the dialogue between them, that’s where meaning lives. It isn’t defined statically as a set of rules or singular description. Instead, it becomes a posture, and a sort of authorship.
This won’t satisfy anyone chasing cosmic guarantees. It won’t comfort someone looking for a divine script or a perfect map. It doesn’t promise destiny, and rarely offers fairness.
What it offers is something more immediate. More grounded. More earned.
That the meaning of a life is revealed through how we move through the world, and how we let the world move through us, each shaping the other in turn. That tension, to me, is sacred.
And in its friction, in that ongoing negotiation between “who I choose to be” and “what the world reveals about me”, I’ve found more clarity than any inherited answer ever gave.
But clarity, like meaning, is not permanent, and seems to always lead to the next question: If this is the self I choose… What happens when the world pushes back?
The Other Edge
Any worldview worth keeping should survive contact with its own weaknesses. If the meaning I’ve proposed here is going to be more than a comforting idea, more than just another philosophical aesthetic, it has to stand up to the same pressure I applied to the inherited answers. And the truth is, it doesn’t always.
Like any framework, it has its blind spots. Places where it stretches thin; moments where someone could reasonably ask, “Isn’t this just another story?”
The first critique comes quickly: isn’t self-definition just modern individualism with a better vocabulary? I’ve thought about that a lot. On the surface, it looks the same, with the focus on agency, autonomy, and self-authorship. The language even overlaps.
But the difference, at least for me, runs deeper. Self-definition in this sense isn’t about image. It’s not performance. It’s not about curating a persona that looks coherent on the outside. It’s about shaping a life from the inside out; by choosing values, aligning behavior with those values, and continuing to do so even when it is neither impressive nor convenient. Still, I know the risk. Any inward-facing framework can drift into self-indulgence if it isn’t grounded in something more than preference. It’s easy to confuse self-discovery with self-justification, and when that happens, integrity quietly turns into branding.
That’s the edge.
Then there’s the question of influence: if we’re shaped through encounters with others, what happens when those encounters go wrong? Not every mirror reflects honestly. Some distort, others manipulate. Some damage you in ways that take years to untangle. It’s easy to say “we become through relationship,” but that leaves out the very real danger of becoming through harm.
The truth is, the world doesn’t just push back, it sometimes pushes in directions that bend us out of shape. But even in those moments, maybe especially in those moments, we still have choices. We can choose what to internalize. We can choose what not to carry forward. We can let pain clarify us, instead of define us. That sounds simple. It isn’t, but I’ve seen people do it, and I’ve tried to do it myself.
Another challenge cuts even deeper: what if you don’t have the space to choose? What if your life is constrained by poverty, trauma, illness, injustice… conditions that narrow the field of possible actions so severely that “choosing your values” sounds like a luxury for people with better options? I don’t dismiss that. It’s real.
Agency is not distributed evenly, and it’s dishonest to pretend otherwise. But even in constraint, I still believe the core principle holds. The scale changes, but the structure doesn’t disappear. In the smallest spaces, in the hardest conditions, there are still choices; interior ones, moral ones, even ones that no one sees. Sometimes meaning is made not by what you achieve, but by what you refuse to become, even when everything around you tries to force the opposite.
Then there’s the critique I can’t entirely answer: is this all too personal to mean anything? If meaning is built from individual experience and filtered through subjective values, does it collapse under its own specificity?
Maybe. I’m not claiming universality here. I’m offering a frame that has held up in my life, but that doesn’t make it a law. I don’t think meaning has to be global to be real. Some truths are small and local and earned. Some meaning is valid not because it applies to everyone, but because it was lived honestly by someone. And that, I think, is enough.
Finally, there’s the risk of emotional isolation. A worldview centered on self-authorship and personal encounter can be misread as a license to disconnect, or an excuse to avoid obligation or withdraw into autonomy. That’s not the goal; the point of building a stable self isn’t to retreat from the world; it’s to meet it without dissolving.
To show up with something real, something chosen, and intact. The point of valuing encounter isn’t to turn people into catalysts for your personal growth, it’s to recognize that growth doesn’t happen in isolation. That who we are is always revealed, tested, and refined through contact with other lives.
These critiques don’t destroy the frame, but they do complicate it. And I think that’s the difference between philosophy and performance, simply whether or not you let the complications in. A meaning that can’t be questioned is just another dogma. A framework that can’t stretch is already broken.
And a life that can’t tolerate contradiction is a life that hasn’t been lived very far.
This, to me, is where the framework becomes most useful, not because it guarantees truth, but because it makes room for friction. It doesn’t ask you to be right. It asks you to stay in the process, to pay attention when things don’t fit, and to re-examine the values you thought were fixed. If nothing else, to notice when the story you’re telling yourself no longer matches the evidence of your own life.
Over time, that process becomes its own kind of clarity. Not perfect or permanent, perhaps, but functional. You adjust your lens, you refine the filter, and you notice the moments when your choices align, and the moments when they don’t. And in that ongoing recalibration, you get something better than certainty.
You get coherence.
Back Through the Vellum
When I return to Vellum now, it reads differently each time, not because the words have changed, but because I have. Its infinite versions of the same souls – rebels, lovers, soldiers, hunted and hunting – aren’t just narrative devices. They’re reflections of the way identity splinters and reforms under pressure. Each iteration carries echoes of the last, but none are quite the same, and none return to the original. In that endless divergence lies the book’s most unsettling truth: infinite selves are only possible in fiction.
We, unlike its characters, don’t fracture across timelines. We get one thread, one body, and one life.
And yet even within that singular arc, we experience our own multiplicity. We become someone else in grief, in love, in conflict, and in change. We outgrow former selves. We contradict them, and carry their residue. We are not infinite… but we are not singular either. We are revisionary creatures, made and remade by choice and consequence, by the people we meet and the people we lose.
Where Vellum expands identity into myth, real life compresses it into a narrower, harder discipline: becoming one self across time, despite change. Not through coherence, but through intention. Through continuity of values, not certainty of form.
Looking back across this path, the thread runs clear. The inherited answers, religious, societal, and aesthetic, don’t collapse because they’re false, but because they simply don’t hold together. They contradict each other, and sometimes even themselves. Their promises fade when you place them side by side.
What remains, enduring through pressure, is smaller and more personal: action, consequence, integrity, encounter. The things we can verify not by belief, but by living them. The choices we make when no one is watching. The values we keep even when they cost us something. The moments when the world reveals us to ourselves, and we have to decide what we’ll do with that truth.
So I return to the original question, though not to answer it, but to stand with it more clearly: What does it mean to live? To choose? To change? To remain a self across time, when everything around you shifts… including you?
No one can tell you the meaning of your life. And anyone who claims they can is either selling something, or hiding from their own uncertainty.
But what I can say, even after every collapse, every rebuild, every confrontation with the limits of what I thought I knew, is this:
Meaning is real. But it doesn’t arrive whole, it’s built. And it is built, moment by moment, in the tension between who you are and who the world asks you to become.
That’s the edge we all walk. And the only story worth telling is the one that keeps walking anyway.
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