I was organizing my bookshelves when one of the books slipped and fell to the floor. It was Friedrich Nietzsche’s The Genealogy of Morals. I picked it up, opened it, and read the first lines of the preface: “We are unknown, we knowers, ourselves to ourselves: this has its own good reason. We have never searched for ourselves — how should it then come to pass, that we should ever find ourselves.”

‘What he says is true,’ I said. ‘Although, I remember a time when I was out there searching for myself. That’s how I spent my twenties, looking for purpose and the meaning of life, trying to figure out whether I was born to be a rockstar or an entrepreneur. But every discovery I made I drowned in whisky. And I had a good reason to do so: I did not like what I found.’

Today, I’m thirty-four, and I still don’t know who I am or what my purpose is.

The meaninglessness of everything demotivates me, though it doesn’t stop me from living my life to the fullest. I often manage to forget my inescapable, inevitable death and the absurdity of life, and I manage to enjoy the moment.

But that’s not the point. That’s not the point, at all.

Maybe we — knowers or not — can never find ourselves.

I don’t know…

On the other hand, sometimes, the goal seems to be the exact opposite — to lose yourself, to get lost, to be intoxicated by life and lose control, to let go, to drown in the sea of forgetfulness and become one with the forgotten.