A world that keeps moving promises more freedom to become whoever we like. It also loosens the old fixed points that once gave people a sense of belonging and meaning. Social media makes the fantasy more seductive: today you can be a mukbang streamer, tomorrow a dancer chasing attention, and the day after something else. Which version is actually yours? Many people never stop to ask. They say they will try something first, and then the trying quietly dissolves into nothing.
At the same time, we are living through a technology shift that is hard to ignore: AI, neural networks, large language models, low-Earth-orbit space flight, new energy, quantum computing. When systems change faster than ordinary people can understand them, the result is confusion, anxiety, and a kind of psychological overload. That is what people call future shock.
Put these two conditions together—identities that flow and a future that arrives too fast—and the question becomes: how does a person locate themselves?
Finding a location may not be an entirely good thing. Still, it is worth thinking about.
The point of locating yourself
When people ask me what philosophy is for, I often use a sailing image. Most crews hit a reef, take on water, lose a mast in a storm, and return to port determined to reinforce the hull. They build a bigger, stronger ship, ready for every disaster the sea can invent, until it is too large to leave harbor. A small number of sailors do not try to predict every disaster. They learn to respond: raise sails when wind comes, lower them in a thunderstorm, close the lower deck after hitting a reef, and when lost, look at the stars in the darkest hour. The first approach is methodology. The last is what philosophy can do—it keeps asking where you actually are in your predicament.
Philosophy is not the only way. Its advantage is that it refuses to begin with the correct answer. It leaves room for thinking about the self before asking, Am I doing this right?
To know your location is similar. It pulls you out of a world organized by standard answers. From a higher vantage point, you look at yourself and search for meanings other than right and wrong.
I once had a friend who constantly asked, “Am I doing this right?” The standard behind his question was usually other people’s judgment. At first I tried to correct his obsession with being right. Eventually I changed tactics. I asked him, “If this were wrong, what would you do?” Over time, that question gave him another angle. Later, after he had lived through the consequences and costs of his choices, he began to ask what right and wrong had to do with the matter at all. People often say that experience teaches better than advice. That only works after someone has acted and taken the first step.
Now our conversations rarely begin with “Am I right?” We talk about the benefits and drawbacks of a choice, and whether the worst cost is something he can bear.
When a person’s orientation shifts from “How will others judge me?” to “What effect and cost will this have for me?”, that is the point of locating yourself. You move the anchor from other people—who cannot be controlled—to yourself.
Someone may object that ignoring others is selfish. But are “what others think of me” and “what this does to me and what it costs” really opposites?
Finding an anchor in yourself
Still, if every anchor is placed inside the self, you enter another extreme.
An anchor means knowing clearly who you are, what you want, and what you do not need. Why else did old sayings speak of standing firm at thirty and being free of doubt at forty? Not because desire disappears, but because many things have found the place where they belong. For many people, the anchor of a marriage is “just get through it.” The anchor of a job is “I have to support the family.” Once those anchors are fixed to a practical standard, the impulses of youth—the urge to oppose the whole world—get converted into “is it worth it?” This is one source of midlife fear: the feeling that one’s impulses, defiance, and uniqueness are being worn away.
Growing up is like an infant discovering that it is not the whole world. Many people get stuck in the infant stage because a baby can cry and receive resources; the self is the center, the only anchor. When a person’s anchor begins to shift toward reality and relationships with others, infancy is left behind. You start to socialize, refer to others, and look for your own anchor.
Here is the absurd paradox: an anchor cannot be placed entirely inside the self, but if it is placed entirely outside, the self slowly disappears. And the outside world is no stable platform. It is moving, and it is suffering future shock. So where should the anchor go?
The craft of wasting a life
I used to look down on Japanese craftsmen. In interviews, they often seemed helpless in ordinary life. Some needed others to manage food and daily routines. Some were socially terrified and could not enter society. Some were so silent they could not explain themselves. It was easy to draw a crude conclusion: a craftsman is someone who cannot do anything else.
But how many people ever reach that level? To spend an entire life on one thing, push it to an extreme, disappear into it, and let it become entangled with the thing one has pursued all along.
I also envied them. They had found the thing they wanted to keep doing for the rest of their lives.
Not long ago, news about Keigo Higashino arrived suddenly and then cooled just as suddenly, as if he had never been absent. On my shelf are many of his books. Over a lifetime he completed more than 100 novels, and many were adapted into films and television. Whatever people think of him—whether they like him or not, whether they prefer the earlier books or dislike the later ones—his life still produced those 100 novels. When I open a Higashino book from decades ago, the author is still there in the words.
In a void ocean, rowing becomes the only orientation. If you row with all your strength toward the North Star, perhaps you reach a promised land. But while you are in the ocean, the only thing to do is row.
When an action becomes an anchor, it is controlled by what I want to do, and it is hard for rapid external changes to sweep it away. The action itself may have no meaning. But if a person wraps their thoughts around it, they build a system that can resist future shock in a moving era. It may show no result and no meaning, yet it is the whole meaning of existing.
This is abstract, and that is why it cannot be fully structured by reason. In black humor, a prisoner digs a tunnel to freedom with a spoon from the dining hall. Freedom is not the meaning. The process of digging, one spoonful at a time, is what being alive means.
The thing worth wasting a life on
For this era—faster, more fragmented, more island-like—placing the anchor in an action may be the best way to avoid a sense of meaninglessness. Avoiding meaninglessness is not mandatory. But when mobility suddenly strips away a person’s sense of existence, or when future shock produces anxiety, an action anchor can help someone get out of the trap faster.
Take my own case. I currently wrap my thoughts around writing. It may not be “right,” but for me it is the best anchor against existential anxiety. The anchor is my action; it is not easily changed by other people. The age does create anxiety around writing—will AI replace creators?—but the act itself gives me a sense of purpose: I know what I want to do today.
For an action to serve as an anchor, several conditions need to be present:
- The action comes from you, not from someone else.
- Its recipients can be other people: aid, rescue, publication, public display.
- It does not begin with “Am I right?” It begins with “What effect and cost will this have for me?”
- Others may evaluate it, but the final decision remains yours. Only you decide whether to do it or not.
- The result is not the meaning. The persistence is. The process proves that you exist.
- The action allows repeated failure, but failure is not a reason to stop.
What the action is will differ from person to person. If you find it, take the first step before you have settled whether it is correct.