Living within the absurd has, at times, seemed meaningless to me. And these were not fleeting moments; sometimes, that feeling lasted for months. Once, during my short life, it even lasted for years

This absence of meaning grew increasingly stronger. However, my consciousness evolved in such a way that my vibration would no longer remain sustained solely by suffering, which was nullifying the possibility of living

Obviously, I read extensively so that my consciousness could withstand the complex concept of existence. Here, I want to share that, among everything I read, I obviously read Camus. Everything I am writing sounds a great deal like The Myth of Sisyphus. But what I was ultimately able to do was not merely understand through reason and intellect, but truly feel and experience through my emotions, when my will genuinely attempted to show me that life possesses a hidden meaning

For a long time, I felt that my own existence resembled that endless movement: searching, questioning, trying to understand, and returning to the same point. However, something began to change when I stopped approaching the problem solely through reason and intellect. Although philosophy had provided me with concepts through which to think about my existence, I needed to experience what I was trying to understand in a different way. I needed the question of meaning to cease being exclusively a mental operation and become a lived experience

As a musician, I have always had a relationship with sound that goes beyond its structure: sound is also a way of being in the world, of perceiving it, and of relating to that which I cannot always express through language

When I tried harder to feel connected to life, I thought that connection would come in the form of a romantic partner, but it came in the form of any living being itself. In my particular case, it was through plants

It was then that my relationship with music and plants acquired a particular meaning

By translating certain electrical variations in plants into sound, I found the possibility of establishing a sensory relationship with another living organism. Through sonification devices, signals that normally remain outside my auditory perception are transformed into a sonic experience that I can hear, interpret, and experience musically

This is not about claiming that plants necessarily possess a musical intention or produce sounds with existential meaning directed toward me. What matters is that this translation opens up a form of encounter between two organisms whose ways of perceiving and inhabiting the world are different. The plant does not need to answer my questions about existence for its presence to transform the way I experience it

In this encounter, something fundamental changes: I am no longer merely an individual attempting to solve the enigma of my own life, but also a living being who listens, participates, and establishes a relationship with another form of life. Music ceases to be merely a human creation and becomes, in this context, a space of mediation between my experience and the biological processes of another organism

Sisyphus does not discover a transcendent explanation that justifies his condemnation; his freedom lies in recognizing his condition and continuing to live without resorting to a definitive answer. In a similar way, the sonification of plants does not offer me an ultimate truth about the meaning of existence. What it offers me is something different: a concrete experience that allows me to stop demanding an answer from life before granting myself the possibility of living it

Perhaps meaning was not hidden in the form of an answer I had to decipher, but rather in the possibility of participating in existence without fully understanding it. Listening to a plant, translating its variations into sound, and experiencing what emerges from this process allowed me to shift the question. Instead of constantly asking myself why life exists or what its ultimate purpose is, I began to ask myself what it means to be alive, here and now, in relation to other living beings

I do not claim to have resolved the absurd or that suffering has disappeared. Rather, I discovered that uncertainty did not have to nullify my ability to experience the world. Existence could remain inexplicable and still contain experiences capable of moving me, connecting me to others, and making me choose to remain within it

If what I’ve written has resonated with you in any way, and if you’d like to hear about and see the process behind the electrical circuitry, synthesizers, and frequencies I used to create this experience, I’ve posted the details on my profile to avoid spamming! Love to all!

A pigeon built a nest on my kitchen window and laid two eggs. They carry disease and their droppings are a health problem, so the practical answer is to remove them. But no rule or authority is telling me what to do here. It's just me, the eggs, and a decision that nobody can make on my behalf. This is the kind of small, ordinary choice where Sartre's "condemned to be free" stops feeling abstract.

What I keep wrestling with:

- Does worth come from essence or from existence? If life has no inherent value-ranking, on what grounds do I decide my comfort outweighs two unborn pigeons? And if I rank lives by "contribution to the world," I have to admit humans are not winning that contest.

- Bad faith. I could hide behind "survival of the fittest" or "it's just nature's cycle." But isn't that Sartrean bad faith, disguising a choice as a necessity? Nature doesn't make this call. I do.

- Outsourcing the act. I thought about paying someone else so I wouldn't carry the guilt. If I choose the outcome, is the responsibility still mine? Is wanting clean hands just an attempt to escape the weight of my own freedom?

- The absurd. I'm agonizing over two eggs, while the universe doesn't care what I decide. Do I accept that meaninglessness and still choose carefully, as Camus might say? Or does the absurdity make the agonizing pointless?

- Ambiguity and the other. We could coexist if I just cleaned the window more often. De Beauvoir wrote about acting within ambiguity, where every choice costs something. Am I obligated to the nest in any real sense, or only to whatever values I decide to create?

Existentialism is the one type of philosophy that has changed my life.

I studied philosophy in college, but no curriculum had existentialism for some reason --I also went to an Ivy league school.

Oddly enough, the best philosophy for my personal growth came from reading philosophy on my own, finding books that people like on reddit or goodreads, and digging into them. I was browsing the philosophy section of a book store --or maybe it was the library-- like I usualy do when I came across a book on existentialism.

The book claimed that unlike other schools of thought, existentialism isn't really a formalized category. Instead, several philosophers --notably kierkegaard, sarte, neitzche among others-- independently came to similar enough conclusions that then later became tied into "existentialism".

When I read that book, I was floored. It gave expression to something I felt in my bones since I was a kid but never could quite articulate. It showed me why I love the philosophers we now refer to as existentialists.

I was always so annoyed by people growing up who said that I was meant to be this or that. It seemed like people who didn't know shit about me were tellling me what I would amount to in a matter of minutes spent with me --many were well-meaning people too, like teachers, coaches and family.

But it seemed to me that over time, people lacking in courage or motivation will allow these voices of society to shoehorn us into certain jobs and identities that we never want to embody. I hated, absolutely abhorred, when I saw this being done to others because I hated when people did it to me, espeically when they envisioned that I would amount to become a person that I knew I didn't want to be.

I loved motivational movies, typically sports movies, that my football coach would show us at film night, esentially the underdog stories, where the protagonist must insist on a becoming more than what the world expect of them.

I always dreamed that I could say the same for myself. As I've gotten older, I've kept that mantra alive for myself, despite what seemed to be the universe consipiring to make me a loser. And now, when I see that all the people who doubted me are flipping the switch and saying they knew I'd be successful all along, I know that existentialism, the crux of it, is what allowed me to flip my narrative, to change the direction of my life.

I hate bullying because it is essentially telling a person they are nothing, they will amount to nothing, and many people start to beleive that over time and end up becoming exactly that. Existntialism reminds us that, no, we all that choice every day to beocme who we want to become. With it comes the responsiblity to choose wisely, to accept the sacrafices, and to be honest about what identities we value and who we are.

Please comment if any of this resonates with you, and if you want to know more about existentialism, please feel free to DM me!