We got life wrong .

do you feel this image like I do?

I think somewhere along the way, we got life completely wrong.

Not in a dramatic, end-of-the-world kind of way. More quietly than that. The way you misbutton a shirt and don't notice until you're already out the door.

We've built our lives around things that were only ever meant to be tools.

Careers became identities.

Success became a number.

Love became a status.

Productivity became morality.

We ask children what they want to be when they grow up instead of asking them what kind of life they want to live. We hand them a list of professions and call it purpose.

And then we’re surprised when adults wake up one morning with impressive titles and empty hands. Somewhere, we confused the map for the destination.

We chase achievements as though they are finish lines, forgetting that most of us don't actually want the title. We want what we think the title will give us.

Freedom.

Security.

Meaning.

Pride.

A life that feels like our own.

Yet we spend so much time climbing ladders that we forget to ask whether they’re leaning against the right wall. Even our relationships suffer from this.

We seek validation and mistake it for love.

We seek attention and mistake it for connection.

We seek certainty and mistake it for happiness.

The truth is that life is much messier than the stories we tell ourselves. It isn’t a straight road with milestones placed every few kilometres. It’s more like wandering through a city at night, turning corners simply because the lights look interesting. And maybe that’s why so many of us are unhappy.

We treat life like a puzzle that needs solving instead of an experience that needs living.

We demand answers from ourselves that even people twice our age don't have.

Who are you?

What do you want?

Where are you going?

As if there is one perfect answer waiting somewhere, hidden under a rock.

Maybe there isn't.

Maybe life isn't about finding a single purpose but collecting pieces of yourself along the way.

Maybe we’re not supposed to become one thing. Maybe we’re supposed to become many things.

Maybe the point isn't certainty at all.

Maybe the point is possibility.

I don't know if we'll ever realize that we've gotten life wrong. Maybe we'll keep measuring ourselves by grades, salaries, followers, and titles because numbers are easier to hold than meaning.

But every now and then, someone steps off the path for a moment and asks a dangerous question:

"Is this actually what I want?"

And I think that's where life begins again.

Not when you find all the answers. But when you become brave enough to question the questions you were handed in the first place.

• rini