How important is one’s life?

‘What do we live for, if it is not to make life less difficult for each other?’ – George Eliot, the pen name of Mary Ann Evans (1819–1880), one of the major English novelists of the Victorian era. She is best known for novels including Middlemarch, Silas Marner, The Mill on the Floss, and Adam Bede.

I USED to wonder whether anyone ever consciously asked themselves: “How important is my life?” I don’t mean grandly, but plainly, like checking the time. As in: Is this thing I’m doing – this entire existence – worth the bother?

I didn’t ask it out of wisdom. The younger me in the 1960s and 1970s didn’t have much wisdom to shout about. I asked it out of comparison, which is a much cheaper habit and far more popular. 

From my teenage years in the 1970s, I was regularly ambushed by feelings of inadequacy, uncertainty, and low confidence. Not because I was born that way, but because I had the misfortune of noticing other people. Specifically, other people who seemed better at things without appearing to try very hard, which is the rudest form of success.

I remember a classmate who always topped the class. Effortless. Serene. As if knowledge wandered into his head and unpacked. I, meanwhile, was slogging away like a medieval peasant, revising, stressing, trying, and still never quite reaching him. It was hard not to conclude that I was missing a vital internal component, perhaps installed at birth but skipped in my case due to budget cuts.

Another friend was a gifted footballer. He could juggle a ball while holding a conversation, not even looking at it, as if the ball had signed a lifelong loyalty contract with his feet. Watching him was equal parts amazing and deeply irritating. I could barely walk and think at the same time.

I love music, which is probably why I still remember this Iban boy I shared a dorm with. He was painfully shy – the sort who could apologise to a chair for bumping into it – but he was also a ridiculously gifted guitarist. 

There I was, earnestly trying to work out why my fingers refused to form anything resembling a chord, staring at the fretboard like it was advanced algebra. Meanwhile, his hands were already sprinting up and down the neck, turning the thing into actual music, as if the laws of effort didn’t apply to him. No fuss, no showing off – just that quiet, infuriating competence.

It did wonders for my self-belief, like a bucket of cold water does wonders for your sense of comfort. I’d sit there thinking I was “learning” when, really, I was providing background disappointment. For a while, I nearly packed it in altogether, because it’s hard to stay motivated when the person next to you makes your best attempt sound like furniture being dragged across a floor.

And then there was the pen.

When I was thirteen, I went to a shop to buy one. It was a blue fountain pen. The shopkeeper opened a drawer to give me some change, and inside was a lot of money. Notes. Coins. Abundance. I stood there with five dollars to my name, staring into that drawer as if it were a portal to a superior version of life. I didn’t know how he made his money. I didn’t know about rent, margins, stock or boring adult realities. I assumed that whatever he had, I lacked. Clearly, he was doing life properly. I was not.

That drawer did more philosophical damage than most books.

Life, being life, carried on regardless of my inner confusion. School taught me many things, some useful, some questionable, and some that have never once helped me survive adulthood. Somewhere along the way, I fell in love with English. Not romantically – no candles – but intellectually. English let me read and write, and through reading and writing, I could learn things no timetable had approved. I could quietly educate myself without asking permission, which is still one of the best features of language.

Much later, I learned something mildly comforting: most people do not walk around consciously asking themselves, “How important is my life?” in a neat, philosophical sentence. Not during lunch. Not while answering emails. Not while trying to remember where they put their keys.

Day-to-day life is far too busy, practical, and noisy for that. Instead, the question slips in wearing disguises. It turns up as:

“Do I matter to anyone?”
“Is what I’m doing meaningful?”
“Would it make a difference if I wasn’t here?”
“Am I wasting my life?”

Same question. Different outfits.

People usually ask the explicit version during pressure points – big losses, grief, depression, burnout, existential or spiritual crises, near-death experiences, or major transitions like graduation, divorce, ageing, or illness. Or late at night, alone, when the noise drops and your brain decides now is the perfect time to hold an unscheduled conference on the meaning of everything.

Some personalities ask it more than others. Reflective, introspective, anxious, philosophical, or depressed people are more likely to frame it clearly. Others feel it without ever naming it – just a vague heaviness, a restlessness, a sense that something is off but refusing to say what.

It’s also worth saying that the question is rarely about importance in a cosmic sense. Most people aren’t secretly hoping the universe is monitoring their progress. The question is usually about connection, impact, and belonging. Humans want to know they matter to someone. The universe is optional.

I still ask the question from time to time. I’m still alive, so it seems reasonable. I don’t always phrase it the same way, but the variations are familiar. How important am I to me? To my wife? To my kids? To my friends? To the people I show up for – or fail to?

I also ask a more irritating follow-up question: Would it matter if I didn’t do this? And then, because I’m feeling brave, I stretch the timeline. Would it matter in a year? Five years? Ten?

This line of questioning has an annoying habit of cutting through clutter. Many things I once believed were urgent turn out to be optional. Many things I thought I could not live without have quietly lost their grip. Some ambitions evaporate entirely, like mist, leaving behind nothing but the memory of how serious I once looked while chasing them.

This is where the sarcasm usually peaks. Because a lot of what we stress about is, frankly, nonsense. Social comparison is a particularly efficient nonsense factory. There will always be someone smarter, richer, fitter, calmer, better adjusted, and annoyingly gifted at football. If importance were a competitive sport, most of us would be relegated very quickly.

And yet.

There comes a point when cynicism grows tired of hearing its own voice. After enough disappointments, enough comparisons, enough quiet doubts, another truth begins to emerge: importance is not a competition. It is not a prize handed to the loudest, richest, cleverest, or most admired among us. It does not sit neatly in bank accounts, framed certificates, or shelves lined with trophies. More often, it lives quietly in the spaces between people.

For a long time, especially in my younger years, I believed importance had to be visible. I thought it would announce itself clearly, like success in a film or glory in a history book. I imagined that someone important would surely know they were important.

Adult life turned out to be far less dramatic.

The older I became, the more I noticed how meaning hides in ordinary moments: answering a phone call when someone needs comfort, keeping promises, returning home tired but still making time for family, showing up even when no reward waits at the end of the effort. Real importance rarely arrives with applause. Most of the time, it passes quietly through small acts that hardly seem worth mentioning.

That used to disappoint me. I wanted life to have some clear measure of importance – something visible, lasting, and perhaps even remarkable. Now, strangely, the ordinary comforts me. It reminds me that a meaningful life does not necessarily have to be a famous one.

Philosophically speaking, life doesn’t come with meaning already attached. At first, this sounds unsettling, almost cold. If meaning isn’t assigned beforehand, then we are free to build it ourselves – slowly, imperfectly, and often clumsily. Meaning grows through relationships, responsibilities, memories, and the traces we leave in other people’s lives. It can be found in work, friendship, family, kindness, curiosity, or simply in the decision to keep going when life becomes difficult.

So how important is my life?

Perhaps not important enough to alter history or be remembered beyond a generation or two. I may never accomplish anything that earns a place in a history book. But I am important enough to affect the people I meet. Important enough that my absence would leave some small silence behind. Important enough to deserve honesty, care, and attention while I am here.

Perhaps this is also why comparing one life with another can be misleading. We often measure importance through wealth, achievement, recognition, or the number of people who know our names. Yet these are only visible measures. They cannot fully account for the private moments in which one person changes another person’s day, gives someone courage, or simply makes another person feel less alone.

These days, the question no longer feels like an accusation. It feels more like a quiet compass. It does not demand greatness from me. It only asks that I remain present, thoughtful, and human.

And perhaps, in the end, that is more than enough.

DISCLAIMER:

The views expressed here are those of the writer and do not necessarily reflect those of the Sarawak Tribune.