But What’s the Point?

On Sisyphus, the strange arrival of thoughts, digital lives, and why I keep making things without requiring the universe to explain itself.

By Sahil Tayal · October 2026

There is an awkward question that can interrupt a perfectly productive afternoon.

But what’s the point?

Not necessarily What is the point of this website? or Will anyone read this essay? Those are manageable questions. They have answers involving usefulness, curiosity, audiences, experiments and the sometimes unromantic realities of publishing things on the internet.

I mean the larger question. Why build anything? Why learn? Why make art if everything eventually changes, disappears or gets forgotten? What, exactly, is all this activity for?

I am 31. Lately I have been writing, designing websites, building small interactive worlds and experimenting with ideas that wander between psychology, technology, education and perfume. There has been a surprising amount of creative output. It has been enjoyable. It has also been tiring. The two facts do not cancel each other out.

And somewhere between another finished project and another new idea, the question returns.

But, Sahil, what’s the point?

I don't take that thought as a verdict. I take it as an interesting — occasionally exhausting — visitor.

The cosmos did not send me a development plan

If there was a universal career counsellor, I appear to have missed the appointment. The cosmos did not email me a ten-year roadmap. It did, however, apparently schedule quite a bit of character development.

There have been different versions of me: the student, the management graduate, the person who worked in organisations, the writer, the family-business observer, the beginner learning how to build things on the web, the person trying to turn abstract feelings into fragrances. None is an adequate summary. All belong to the story.

I used to imagine purpose as something one would eventually find, as if somewhere behind the noise there were a sealed envelope with instructions. I am less convinced now.

Perhaps some meanings are discovered. Perhaps others are made through relationships, responsibility, attention and work. Perhaps we are asking several different questions while using the same word, meaning.

This distinction matters because “What is the cosmic purpose of existence?” and “What makes my next hour worth inhabiting?” are not the same question. The first may remain unanswered. The second may be answerable before dinner.

The boulder is not a personality assessment

In the Greek myth, Sisyphus is condemned to push a stone uphill, only to watch it fall and begin again. The twentieth-century writer Albert Camus used this predicament to explore the absurd: the collision between our demand for ultimate meaning and a universe that does not provide a clear reply.

It is tempting to turn Sisyphus into a mascot for pointless work. Wake up, push rock, repeat. A rather poor job description.

But there is another way to read the story. Camus is interested in whether a person can encounter the lack of a final cosmic answer without abandoning the richness of living. Not whether the hill leads to a promotion. Not whether the stone improves his personal brand. Whether lucidity and participation are possible together.

My stone is not punishment. That difference is important. I choose many of my projects. I can stop, change direction, share the effort or do nothing at all. Comparing ordinary creative work with eternal torment would be melodramatic, even by internet standards.

Still, the metaphor captures something recognisable: projects finish; the desire to make something else returns; satisfaction is real but rarely permanent. A completed website does not settle metaphysics. Nor was it supposed to.

I am beginning to suspect that the difficulty comes when I ask a finite activity to justify the whole of existence. That's a rather unreasonable performance review to give a web page.

Where did the question even come from?

There is another strange feature of the thought what's the point? I did not always consciously invite it. Sometimes it simply appears.

Where do thoughts come from?

Science is not clueless here. Researchers study spontaneous thought, mind-wandering, memory, attention, emotion and the brain's so-called default mode network. A 2023 review of spontaneous thinking describes how brain-network dynamics, memory processes and neurochemical systems contribute to thoughts that arrive without deliberate planning. Work on the default mode network explores its relationship with autobiographical memory and the inner narrative through which we construct a sense of self.

In other words, a thought does not have to be a mysterious transmission from elsewhere just because I did not consciously author it. The brain is not a blank stage waiting for an executive to approve every line of dialogue.

But there are still hard questions. Why does any of this processing feel like something from the inside? Why is there an experience of being me, rather than only the machinery described from the outside?

Here the scientific and philosophical conversation is genuinely unfinished.

The question of how thoughts arise is related to, but different from, the question of why there is subjective experience at all. Conflating the two makes both harder to understand.

Is consciousness local, non-local, or are we confusing categories?

The word non-local is seductive. It sounds like a secret door in the universe. But we should be careful: in physics, non-locality has technical meanings. It does not automatically follow that a human mind is operating outside the brain, or that quantum phenomena establish a cosmic consciousness.

Different schools offer genuinely different explanations for consciousness:

Neuroscientific and physicalist approaches look for explanations in physical processes. Global Neuronal Workspace Theory emphasizes information becoming available to multiple brain systems; Integrated Information Theory connects experience to particular forms of integrated causal structure. Higher-order and recurrent-processing theories offer further competing accounts. These are research programmes, not final verdicts. In a major 2025 adversarial study, predictions from the workspace and integrated-information accounts received mixed support, with important challenges to both.

Dualist approaches hold, in different ways, that consciousness cannot be completely reduced to physical descriptions. They take subjective experience seriously, but must explain its relationship to the brain and why changes to the brain so reliably change experience.

Panpsychism proposes that experiential properties may be fundamental features of nature, rather than appearing only after matter reaches a certain complexity. It is a serious philosophical position with substantial problems of its own, including how small-scale experience could combine into the unified experience of a person. See the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy's overview.

Nondual traditions, including Advaita Vedānta, offer accounts in which consciousness is fundamental to reality. These are sophisticated metaphysical frameworks; they should not be presented as experimentally established neuroscience. Importantly, Buddhist philosophies of mind often challenge the idea of a permanent, independent self. “Eastern philosophy” is not one theory.

Embodied and extended-mind approaches question the idea that thinking is best understood as an isolated computer inside a skull. Embodied cognition investigates the roles of the body and its activity in cognition; externalist and extended-mind theories ask how environmental tools and social contexts can partly constitute cognitive processes. This is not the same claim as paranormal or quantum non-local consciousness.

My position is provisional: brains are profoundly and demonstrably involved in human thinking and experience; the ultimate nature of subjective experience remains debated. Not knowing everything does not mean we know nothing. An open question is permission to investigate, not permission to declare every answer equally proven.

Maybe “What’s the point?” is a paradigm problem

The philosopher of science Thomas Kuhn used paradigm to describe the shared models, methods and assumptions through which scientific communities conduct inquiry. I am borrowing that word more loosely here — as a metaphor for the frame within which a personal question makes sense, not as a claim that my afternoon has undergone a scientific revolution.

Consider what happens to the same question in different frames.

In a cosmic-purpose frame, “What’s the point?” asks whether existence has a final, externally assigned mission. I cannot honestly certify one.

In an achievement frame, the question becomes: “What measurable result will justify the hours?” Sometimes that is useful. Buildings need to work; customers need actual value. But not every poem needs a business model.

In an existential frame, purpose is something we participate in making through choices and commitments. No cosmic certificate required.

In a relational frame, the point may be a person helped, a conversation shared, a child encouraged, or a stranger who finds a useful sentence.

In an embodied frame, the question gets smaller and wonderfully physical: what happens when I put down the phone, walk, eat, sleep, smell something beautiful, or sit beside someone without documenting it?

And then there is a meta-frame: perhaps my question has been demanding one universal kind of answer from activities that have different kinds of value.

An answer from this wider frame is not “Here is the secret reason for everything.” It is “Which kind of reason are you actually asking for?” That does not solve the metaphysics. It prevents metaphysics from bullying breakfast, friendship and craftsmanship into irrelevance.

This is a hypothesis about framing, not a scientifically validated ladder in which one paradigm is inherently superior to all the others.

The question changes its accent across cultures

Wondering whether life means anything is not a uniquely Western invention. Human traditions across the world have considered suffering, impermanence, duty, selfhood, liberation, belonging and mortality. Their answers — and even their preferred questions — differ.

That difference shows up in psychology, too. In a study of young adults in Japan and the United States, Michael Steger and colleagues found that the relationship between searching for meaning and feeling meaning differed across their samples. Searching was more negatively associated with already having meaning and well-being in the US sample, while the relationship was more compatible — even positive — in the Japanese sample. One study with those populations cannot stand in for all cultures, but it challenges a familiar assumption: if I am still searching, I must be failing.

Perhaps searching is not always a deficiency. Sometimes it is how a life stays intellectually alive.

A Buddhist account of impermanence may invite a different response from a theory of lasting selfhood. A philosophical tradition that centres duty and relationship may understand purpose differently from one that centres individual self-authorship. These are possibilities to investigate, not stereotypes about what every person from a culture believes.

I live in India, write on a global internet and borrow ideas from many intellectual traditions. I would rather let those frameworks disagree productively than force them into a fake universal consensus.

An increasingly digital self still has a body

I can spend an afternoon building a digital world in which objects react to gestures, systems evolve and visitors choose their own paths. Then I can close the laptop and realise I have barely moved.

There is a peculiar asymmetry in modern life. My ideas can travel far beyond my body while my body remains in one chair.

Digital life is real life in the sense that relationships, ideas, work and consequences genuinely occur there. Yet a profile, a portfolio or a beautifully animated universe cannot entirely replace bodily presence. Theories of embodied cognition suggest that bodily interaction is not incidental to how we think. That gives me a question worth testing in ordinary life: does the strange heaviness sometimes intensify when I live too long as a cursor, an avatar or a public archive rather than as a breathing, moving person?

I do not know that this explains existential questioning in general. It is a hypothesis, not a clinical claim, and digital tools are not inherently alienating. They can create connection and agency as readily as distance. But it is worth noticing the difference between representing a life and inhabiting one.

I want my internet work to remain a doorway back into experience, not a substitute for it. A fragrance is especially good at reminding me of this. You cannot smell an elegant description of rose. At some point, the nose must vote.

Heaviness does not need to become an identity

A thoughtful life does not feel light every day. Fatigue, uncertainty, grief, boredom and ordinary sadness are part of a wide human emotional range. A passing feeling or a philosophical question is not, on its own, a diagnosis. Duration, intensity, circumstances and the effect on everyday functioning matter when distinguishing ordinary experience from conditions that deserve clinical assessment.

Equally, I do not want to romanticise prolonged suffering as a badge of depth. If heaviness becomes persistent, overwhelming or disruptive, it deserves appropriate attention and care. Art is meaningful, but it is not a universal substitute for support.

There is space between declaring every difficult thought a medical event and pretending every difficult thought is proof of superior insight. Most of life happens in that space.

And rest belongs there, too. Making something is one response to existential uncertainty. Sitting quietly, meeting a friend, laughing at a ridiculous joke, or taking a day off can be equally legitimate. The universe has not made daily output a condition of admission.

So why do I keep creating?

Because making things gives my curiosity somewhere to go.

Because ideas become more honest when they meet materials: a sentence, a webpage, an interaction, a scent. Reality replies. The code breaks. The wording sounds pompous. The formula smells wrong. I revise it. There is pleasure in this conversation with the world.

Because a project can be useful to someone I may never meet. Because learning enlarges the range of things I can notice. Because an ordinary evening spent making something can be a good evening without becoming evidence for a universal thesis.

I also enjoy recognition. I would be pretending otherwise if I claimed to be indifferent to readers, visitors or appreciation. But applause is a fragile foundation for meaning: it depends on other people arriving at the right moment. I want the practice itself to contain some of its reward.

My recent creative work does not prove I have found the answer to existence. It proves something smaller, firmer and more interesting: I can engage with uncertainty and still make things I care about. I can be productive and tired, curious and unconvinced, grateful and unsettled, all in the same week.

Maybe adulthood is not the final elimination of existential questions. Maybe it is learning which questions deserve analysis, which deserve action, and which can accompany us while we make tea.

The stone can wait

I began with a question that may not go away.

But what’s the point?

Sometimes my answer is art. Sometimes it is another inquiry. Sometimes it is a person, a song, a walk, a meal, or a moment in which nobody asks me to become more impressive than I am.

I do not need to pretend the cosmos gave me a development plan. I do not need to turn every difficult season into an inspiring character arc, either. Some chapters are simply heavy. Some are funny. Some make sense much later. Some may never make a coherent story, and that does not invalidate the life that contained them.

Today I make something because I am here, because I am curious, and because the world — however mysterious — is available for contact.

Tomorrow I may ask the question again.

That is all right.

I can put the stone down. I can pick it up again. The day counts either way.

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Keep exploring

These are related inquiries and creative experiments, not evidence that I have solved the questions above:

• The Meaning Lab — ordinary life, craft and purpose.
• Enough — ambition without making self-worth conditional on the next achievement.
• Still Becoming — changing one's mind while remaining accountable.
• The Offline Life — the body and everyday life beyond the screen.
• The Identity–Action Gap — why commitments do not automatically become actions.
• The Public Universe — the full atlas of essays, research and interactive worlds.
• My essays on Medium — longer-form reflections and experiments in public thinking.

This is a personal philosophical essay informed by scholarship, not a scientific theory or medical guidance. Where it speculates, it says so.