My mom asked me this question yesterday and I don’t think she meant it to be profound.

I was complaining, as usual, about the routineness of life. I had just gotten back from a physical with a doctor I see every couple years and felt like a test subject being quietly judged how I live my life.

“Your blood pressure is high. Does that happen at the doctor’s office?”

How the fuck do I know? I’m never here.

At least my PSA levels were normal and I don’t need a camera shoved up my ass yet.

Driving to work today, I kept thinking about what my mom asked me. There has to be more to life than maintenance.

Haircuts. Dentist appointments. Exercise. Work. Socializing. Traveling. Repeating the same conversations. Wondering why work feels the same this year as it did last year.

Eventually, even the things you once looked forward to become familiar.

How many rounds of golf can a person play before they stop seeing the course?

Maybe that’s part of what people miss, or never ask.

Not boredom exactly, but the feeling that life slowly turns into management. Managing your health. Your schedule. Your money. Your stress. Yourself.

I think modern life makes this worse because we’re constantly shown some impossible version of what life is supposed to look like.

The perfect person doesn’t drink, doesn’t smoke, drinks twelve bottles of water a day, runs twelve miles every morning, sleeps eight perfect hours, meal preps on Sundays, meditates before work, and somehow spends weekends in Rio, holidays in Paris, and workdays answering emails from a beach in Turks and Caicos.

Life isn’t optimization.

The person I just described isn’t enlightened, they’re fragile. Throw a wrench into the schedule and they short circuit. Try traveling for 2 weeks out of suitcase to 5 cities and see how well you optimize.

Which brings me back to my mom’s question:

“What do you think life is?”

*I couldn’t write this better than AI*

And maybe that’s the real thing sitting underneath all of it.

Time.

The quiet realization that life is slowly killing everyone in real time. Not metaphorically. Literally.

Every year your body changes. Your parents get older. Your friends disappear into careers, marriages, routines, illnesses. Your face changes in the mirror slowly enough that you barely notice until one day you do.

I don’t know what age people fully realize this, but I feel acutely aware of it lately.

What amazes me is how normal everyone acts about it.

People wake up, answer emails, argue about sports, go grocery shopping, sit in traffic, make dinner plans — all while moving, second by second, toward something unavoidable.

And somehow society collectively agrees not to acknowledge how insane that really is.

That might be humanity’s greatest achievement.

Or its greatest delusion.