There are nights when the silence feels heavier than noise, when you look around at the faces passing by, glowing faintly under artificial light, and you wonder:
What are we all doing, really?

We rise each morning to repeat the same ritual, chasing schedules, numbers, promises that vanish by evening. We build systems to simplify life, and those systems evolve into chains we can’t escape. We celebrate progress, but our progress has become a labyrinth, one with no center, no exit, only walls made of our own cleverness.

And sometimes I think that perhaps humanity was never a success story. Maybe we were a failed experiment that learned to justify itself with noise.

1. The Myth of Meaning

We were told life had meaning. That if we worked, earned, achieved, and followed the path drawn before us, we would find peace.
Yet peace always lingers just beyond reach, like a mirage shimmering on a road we keep walking.

In truth, we built meaning to survive the void.

Dostoevsky once wrote, “Man is a mystery; if you spend your entire life trying to puzzle it out, don’t say you’ve wasted your time.”

But we no longer seek to solve that mystery . We’ve buried it under entertainment and ambition. We have traded contemplation for consumption, and silence for stimulation. Our ancestors looked at the stars and asked questions. We look at screens and expect answers. It’s an endless quest to find meaning in different lives with various experiences.

2. The Illusion of Purpose

We make our own meanings and call them purpose.

For a businessman, the purpose is to find a solution, to expand, to earn more; his morality is measured in growth charts and quarterly reports.
For a criminal, the purpose is to fulfill a darker need, such as power, revenge, hunger, or survival, and within that twisted logic, he too finds justification.

Each man carries his own private god, and that god is nothing but his idea of purpose.
For some, it’s creation; for others, destruction. Yet both believe they are right. For the Buddha, peace and meditation are the purpose; for Hitler, domination and winning the world was his purpose. Both of them thought they were right in their own way.

We define our own purposes and mistake them for life itself.
One lives for profit, another for pleasure, another for vengeance, another for virtue, and all are convinced their cause is sacred.

The absurdity lies here: purpose is not universal, yet it governs every soul like an unseen dictator.
We invent it, worship it, and die for it. All the while forgetting that it was born in our own minds.

So perhaps, the experiment was designed to see if creatures could create meaning out of emptiness and believe in it deeply enough to fight, suffer, and kill for it.

– Dipesh

3. Progress and the Machine

Every century, we call ourselves “modern.” We invent machines to ease our burdens, and then create new burdens to feed those machines.

The worker of the 21st century does not till soil; he tills data, yet his soul starves just the same.

Kafka understood this terror — the invisible machinery of existence that grinds individuality into dust.
We have become characters in his unfinished novel: The Trial of Progress, where everyone is accused, no one is innocent, and the law itself is absurd.

Our systems no longer serve us; we serve them. The clock is our master. The algorithm is our priest. The market is our god.

And yet, in the deepest corner of our being, something still whispers: This cannot be all.

4. The Psychological Collapse

If a man spends long enough pretending, he begins to forget what pretending is.

– Dipesh

We pretend to be happy. We pretend to be purposeful. We pretend that endless productivity equals worth.

But when the lights go out and the noise fades, we meet ourselves like raw, trembling, and unmasked.
That’s when the real questions surface:
What am I doing here?
Why do I feel like a stranger in my own life?
What if the system is insane, and sanity lies in rebellion?

These are dangerous questions that haunt me. The kind that drove Dostoevsky’s characters to madness and Kafka’s to metamorphosis.
Yet without them, we remain sleepwalkers, mistaking movement for meaning.

5. The Cosmic Irony

Look at us, a species born from stardust, capable of thought, emotion, love, and yet shackled by its own intelligence.
We conquered the physical world only to lose the inner one.
We mapped the genome but not the soul.
We reached the moon but not each other.

What irony is that in our effort to control nature, we have become unnatural ourselves.
We live longer, but feel emptier.
We have everything, but touch nothing.
We speak endlessly, but say so little.

If an alien civilization were observing us, they might wonder:
“Why do these creatures, so full of potential, choose to live like prisoners of their own inventions?”

6. The Failed Experiment or the Necessary One

And yet, maybe failure is not the end, but the essence. Maybe humanity’s collapse is part of a deeper unfolding — the universe learning humility through consciousness.

Perhaps the experiment was never meant to succeed, but to feel.
To question. To suffer. To look at the abyss and still say, “I exist.”

Because in that moment of questioning, something transcendent happens: the machine pauses, and the human reappears. We may be lost, but we are aware of being lost, and that awareness is divine.

The Mirror

Maybe God, or whatever force wrote this cosmic script, only wanted a mirror.
Something that could look back and ask, “Why?”
And so it made us flawed, restless, self-destructive, beautiful.

We are not the failed experiment.
We are the experiment, realizing it has failed, and in that realization lies the only form of redemption left to us.

This piece isn’t written to offer answers — only to hold up a mirror. Perhaps the experiment continues, each thought another ripple in the cosmic pond. And maybe, the moment we question why we’re alive… we finally begin to live.

— Author Dipesh