The biggest thing we distract ourselves with (in the Western world) is no longer pleasure but finding meaning. It’s much easier to get caught up in finding meaning rather than doing, feeling, perceiving.

I’m questioning what that is — meaning. What does it “mean” to have a meaningful life? What does it “mean” to create a meaningful thing? And mostly, why does everything have to “mean” something?

I think our quest for finding meaning has become religious and incessant in its pursuit in a way that no longer contributes to the genuine development of the search. It’s a default mode of being that isn’t necessarily expansive; instead, it is obsessive and relentless and inherently tied to a type of perfection. It’s odd that way, how relinquishing actually renders freedom.

There’s some phrase stirring said by someone at some point — I’ve conflated flowers blooming with sunsets but whatever. The thing is: they just do. They just happen. And if I’ve learned anything at all, it’s that “just do your best” tends to cover most if not everything.

I suppose that "getting older" simply means acknowledging the passing and progression of time and realising that we process time in increments, trying to relate it to personal change. Lately I've been noticing the ways that I wear this time now.

I don't know if I worry less (particularly during this moment in history), but I surrender less frequently and less anxiously to that worry. I am better equipped to resist easy feelings, a seductive recklessness that teases the possibility of making up for whatever is lacking in a given moment. And of course, there are lots of empty moments. Maybe this is a way to say that all I try to do these days is embody acceptance.

I think that people who are not loved well or stably or reassuringly, or at all quite frankly, in a way they can understand when they are younger are inevitably more impulsive. They spend their entire lives looking in often the wrong places for something to fill up that void. I think this made me rash and it made me desirous. Above all, it connected me to all the outcasts and people on the fringe.

When I feel that lack, and trust me I do, I get tempted to pick up the phone, a bottle, a flame. I attempt to use other people, people who I do not know nor care for in the way that I know I can, or that matters, to alleviate me from the pain of loneliness, of longing, and of lack. And so I'm older now. I don't pick up the phone very much anymore.

At what point do you begin to take responsibility for your own life? At what point do you say: enough is enough and if I'm going to stick around in this place, I have to muster and magnify the resolve. I think the breaking point is not always profound or seismic like you see in the movies, but sometimes just a steady chain of fissures. So much of this life ends up being about accumulation which is to say that somehow it all matters and doesn't matter at all.

Taking responsibility to me means owning my role in things, especially my own fucking life. Assume the lead role in your own life! It positions me as an active director, not a passive bystander to which things happen.

Of course, there is an element of happening, of being acted upon. That's for sure; there are plenty of black swan events out of our personal control. We are living through one now. But we can control our responses to circumstances; we can keep trying to adjust them until they become more reflexive, and time passes, and we feel somewhat anew. Better. That's all it is: this going and going and ongoing and once you stop pushing against it, you can just lean in.

I think one of the turning points for me as an adult is no longer seeing the point of or feeling gratified by blame. I can point a finger in a factual sense; I can recall events, words and actions but it does me no good to attach emotional wounds to those histories anymore. I am not grown up in any proper sense of the word but I am grown up in that I no longer expect my parents (or others in my orbit) to do what a younger me believed they should have done; I do not blame them anymore for the way things shook out. It is nobody's responsibility once you are an adult to make you feel love or to heal you. I learned the hard lessons very early. Nothing lasts forever and you cannot make someone love you.

So much of taking control and ownership does not mean more management, more involvement but rather more perspective. Knowing when to take a step back, and stay there. Knowing that in the grand scheme of things you have no control, but you can still make someone, including yourself, feel good. You can always do something beautiful.

Often as she lies against him in the half-sleep that follows love on Sunday afternoons, she lapses into a state that is like no other. She no longer knows what city or town the noises are coming from—the sounds of cars, footsteps, and words from the outside world. All at once she's in her cubicle at the girls' dormitory, and in hotel rooms (Spain in 1980, Lille with P in the winter), and in bed as a child, nestled against her sleeping mother. She feels herself in several different moments of her life that float on top of each other. Time of an unknown nature takes hold of her consciousness and her body too. It is a time in which past and present overlap, without bleeding into each other, and where, it seems, she flickers in and out of all the shapes of being she has been. It is a sensation she's had before, from time to time. Perhaps drugs could bring it on, but she has never taken any, for she values pleasure and lucidity above all else. Now, in a state of expansion and deceleration, she takes hold of the sensation. She has given it a name, "the palimpsest sensation," though the word is not quite accurate if she relies on the dictionary meaning, "a manuscript on which the original writing has been scratched out to make room for later writing." She sees it as a potential instrument of knowledge that is not only for herself, but general, almost scientific, though a knowledge of what, she doesn't know.

"One day there was an anonymous present sitting on my doorstep — Volume One of Capital by Karl Marx, in a brown paper bag. A joke? Serious? And who had sent it? I never found out. Late that night, naked in bed, I leafed through it. The beginning was impenetrable, I couldn’t understand it, but when I came to the part about the lives of the workers—the coal miners, the child laborers—I could feel myself suddenly breathing more slowly. How angry he was. Page after page. Then I turned back to an earlier section, and I came to a phrase that I’d heard before, a strange, upsetting, sort of ugly phrase: this was the section on “commodity fetishism,” “the fetishism of commodities.” I wanted to understand that weird-sounding phrase, but I could tell that, to understand it, your whole life would probably have to change.

His explanation was very elusive. He used the example that people say, “Twenty yards of linen are worth two pounds.” People say that about every thing that it has a certain value. This is worth that. This coat, this sweater, this cup of coffee: each thing worth some quantity of money, or some number of other things—one coat, worth three sweaters, or so much money—as if that coat, suddenly appearing on the earth, contained somewhere inside itself an amount of value, like an inner soul, as if the coat were a fetish, a physical object that contains a living spirit. But what really determines the value of a coat? The coat’s price comes from its history, the history of all the people involved in making it and selling it and all the particular relationships they had. And if we buy the coat, we, too, form relationships with all those people, and yet we hide those relationships from our own awareness by pretending we live in a world where coats have no history but just fall down from heaven with prices marked inside. “I like this coat,” we say, “It’s not expensive,” as if that were a fact about the coat and not the end of a story about all the people who made it and sold it, “I like the pictures in this magazine.”

A naked woman leans over a fence. A man buys a magazine and stares at her picture. The destinies of these two are linked. The man has paid the woman to take off her clothes, to lean over the fence. The photograph contains its history—the moment the woman unbuttoned her shirt, how she felt, what the photographer said. The price of the magazine is a code that describes the relationships between all these people—the woman, the man, the publisher, the photographer—who commanded, who obeyed. The cup of coffee contains the history of the peasants who picked the beans, how some of them fainted in the heat of the sun, some were beaten, some were kicked.

For two days I could see the fetishism of commodities everywhere around me. It was a strange feeling. Then on the third day I lost it, it was gone, I couldn’t see it anymore."

• Wallace Shawn (Fever)