📘 Why We Are Here: The Ultimate Answer for Individuals, Civilizations, and the Future

Chapter 6: Why Individuals Are Here

Life lasts only a few short decades. This is a question everyone is eventually forced to confront in some quiet, late-night moment. The first time we truly realize that life is finite, time suddenly gains weight. You may have felt it too: pausing unexpectedly and asking yourself—
“Why am I going through all of this?”

This is not the philosophical exam question of “What is meaning?” nor the motivational-book version of “Find your mission.” It is a more instinctive, almost wordless confusion: if life will end, then what is this path ultimately for?

This fear arises from the void—but it never remains there. It pushes you to search for an answer that belongs only to you. And that is precisely where our discussion of “why individuals are here” begins.

You Are Not the Center of the Universe, but Your Experience Is Absolutely Real

From a scientific perspective, humans are not the center of the universe. From a philosophical perspective, we do not even know whether the universe “cares” about us. Yet none of this undermines one fundamental truth: your experience is real.

Whatever the universe’s purpose may be, your joy, your pain, your desire, and your hesitation—these computations occurring within consciousness—cannot be negated by any “objective universe.”

No matter how vast the universe is, it does not make your heartbeat any less real in this moment. No matter how many galaxies exist, they do not reduce your sorrow by even a gram.

Once you understand this, you realize that “Does the universe care about me?” is not the real question. The real question is:
“How do I experience this world at my own scale?”

The Only Guarantee of Your Arrival: The Ability to Experience

When you came into this world, no one guaranteed you future wealth, smooth success, or ready-made answers. But you were given one irreplaceable “initial condition”: the ability to experience the world.

You do not need to choose in order to begin experiencing. As long as you are alive, experience happens spontaneously.

When you are hungry, you experience hunger;
when you laugh, you experience joy;
when you fall in love, you experience complex and profound emotions;
even when you do nothing at all, you still experience the state of “doing nothing.”

In other words, the proof of your existence is not your purpose, but your experience.

This is the first cornerstone of individual meaning.

Meaning Is Not Given, but Generated: Choice Shapes Who You Are

We often mistake meaning for a reward—something that appears only after achieving goals, attaining success, or conquering difficulty. But consciousness does not operate this way. Meaning is not something bestowed by the universe, nor an “objective entity” waiting to be discovered. Meaning is produced by your choices.

What you choose, what you let go of,
where you invest your attention, and what costs you are willing to bear,
these paths continually adjust the weights of nodes within your consciousness,
eventually forming a computational trajectory that belongs only to you.

That trajectory is your life. All of your meaning slowly settles within it. Thus, individual meaning is not “experience itself,” but this:

Within a finite life, how you choose to experience—freedom of consciousness is meaning.

You Are the Only Being in the Universe Who Experiences the World in Your Way

Your conscious structure is not a replica. Your experiences are not a script. Your growth is not copy-and-paste.

Topology determines the possibilities of consciousness. Your childhood, the people you encountered, your genes, your culture, and your choices together shaped a conscious computational path that exists nowhere else in the world. No second person can understand the world the way you do. No second person can feel a song, a landscape, or a pain in the way you do. No second person can fall in love the way you do. You are, across the entire history of the universe and all its future scales, the only being capable of producing “your version of experience.”

This is not exaggeration. It is a mathematical conclusion of topology.

Therefore, the meaning of individual existence does not lie in any task assigned to you, but in this: through you, the world completes an experience that only you can generate.

The “Comfort” of Virtual Worlds: Reality Does Not Depend on the Nature of the World

What if the real world is virtual? Would your life become less meaningful—or more meaningful?

In fact, neither.

When we say “experience is real,” we are not referring to the material of the world itself, but to the computational result of experience within consciousness.

When you feel pain, it is pain. When you feel joy, it is joy. When you regret a decision, that regret itself contains nothing virtual.

Even if this world is virtual, your life remains—without any discount—real.

This is the comfort that virtual worlds provide: they remind us that meaning does not belong to the substance of the world, but to consciousness itself.

No matter what the world is made of, what you experience as real is real; what consciousness acknowledges is reality.

Only When You Understand “Why Individuals Are Here” Does the Meaning of Civilization Become Clear

If individual meaning comes from experience, choice, and structural uniqueness, then what about civilization? Civilization is merely a structure composed of countless individuals, and its meaning can only be understood by starting from individual meaning.

When you first realize that your life is an unrepeatable experience in the universe, and that civilization is the interweaving and extension of countless experiences, you can understand why civilizations continually expand, evolve, explore, and create.

Civilization does not exist to aggrandize itself, but to allow more experiences to occur. And only when an individual understands their own meaning does the meaning of civilization become clearly visible for the first time.

At this point, you may already sense another, even larger question approaching: what is civilization ultimately for? Where are its boundaries? Why must it exist at all?

These questions will be taken up in the next part.