the box of memories

may 10, 2026

on the meaning of life. not legacy. not the world. the quality of impact you have on the specific people you care about.

The question keeps coming up. Friends ask it. I ask myself in journals at 1 AM. Strangers on a podcast ask the version that pretends to be casual. What's the meaning of life? What's your purpose?

I have a real answer now. It took me two years to arrive at it. The answer is short and it is going to sound smaller than most people expect, because most people who ask this question are hoping for change the world or find your calling or follow your passion. The answer I have isn't any of those.

The meaning of life, for me, is the quality of impact I have on the people I care about.

Not the world. Not legacy. Not the number of people I help. The quality — measured in attention, presence, the moments where I show up — that I bring to the specific people whose lives I am actually inside of.

This essay is the long version of how I got to that answer, and why I think the smaller answer is the right one.

Where I started: money

For a long time I thought the answer was money.

I became a business major because of Warren Buffett. I picked accounting because Buffett picked accounting. I was 17 and I had read the biography and I had absorbed the framework that if you understand money, you can solve every problem. The framework is comforting because it is concrete. Money is a number. You can measure your progress against it. You can know whether you are winning.

I built the dropshipping brand on this framework. I locked myself in Odegaard Library for a quarter and read 200 books on persuasion and behavioral economics, half of which were about making money. I shipped ads. I watched the dashboard light up. By the time the brand hit $1M in revenue, I was sleeping four hours a night and feeling like I had cracked something.

Then the payment provider banned the account. The brand stopped. The money I thought I had made was frozen for months. The dashboard went dark. The framework collapsed.

What I learned in the collapse: money allows you to solve everything, but it really only solves the money problems. It does not make you more charismatic. It does not make you more attractive. It does not make you less lonely. It does not make your mom proud in a different way than she already is. The money problem is one specific problem. Money solves that one specific problem. Other problems remain.

This is the part Warren Buffett doesn't write about in the autobiographies. He talks about the compounding. He talks about the deals. He doesn't talk about the fact that even with infinite money, you still have to figure out what to do every Tuesday morning when you wake up.

I had to figure that out. I did not have a framework for it.

The Buddha argument

There's an argument I keep coming back to.

If you come from a poor background, money is always a problem. Your mom worries about money. Your dad takes the second shift to pay for your tuition. The household runs at a tight margin and the margin shapes every decision.

If you come from a rich background, money is never a problem, and the people who come from this background often say money doesn't matter. They believe it. They are also wrong, because the absence of money problems is the specific condition that allows them to focus on other problems.

I am in the second group. I have a mom who flies CI22 across the Pacific to come see me. I have a dad who pays my Foster tuition. The household I grew up in did not have unlimited money but it had enough that I never had to think about it on most days. Money was never truly the problem. It wasn't a problem I truly saw.

This is a privilege. The privilege is invisible from the inside. When I said money doesn't matter at 17, I was saying it from inside a household that had spent 20 years working hard so that I would never have to.

The Buddha-of-the-rich version of money doesn't matter is a luxury belief. The Buddha-of-the-poor version is real wisdom. I want to be in the second category, but I have to earn my way into it. The way I earn it is by remembering that there are people I care about — my mom specifically — for whom the faucet still needs to run. I have to make sure it keeps running. That's not because money matters in the cosmic sense. It's because the people I love live inside a system where money is the medium of care.

So I revised the position. Money does not matter as an end. Money matters as a verb. Pay for mom's flights. Pay for grandma's medical care. Pay for the next generation's tuition. These are not money problems. They are care problems that happen to be denominated in dollars.

The framework that replaced money is the meaning is money is the medium, the meaning lives elsewhere.

I had to find where the meaning lives.

Second chances don't exist

There is a genre of anime I love called isekai. The protagonist dies in our world and gets reborn in a fantasy world where he can level up and remake himself. Shield Hero is one. Mushoku Tensei is another. I have watched a lot of them.

The reason I love isekai is that I have always wanted a second chance.

Not at any specific thing. At everything. The instinct to remake yourself — to start over with the knowledge you have now — is the engine of every isekai protagonist and the engine of every 19-year-old who is unhappy with his decisions so far.

I have eventually concluded that the second-chance fantasy is the wrong approach to life.

Everyone is given a deck of cards. Some people get better hands — their parents have connections, their families have money, their cultural context gives them advantages they didn't earn. Other people make their deck of cards work through bluffs, through making people believe they are stronger than they are. Other people have a commendable will — a conviction so deep that they will do whatever it takes to play the hand they were dealt to its highest possible outcome.

The third category is what I find magnetic. Conviction so great that they're willing to see it to the end. It doesn't matter what the hand is. It matters what they do with it.

The isekai fantasy says if I had a different hand, I could win. The conviction frame says the hand is the hand. The game is what you do with it. The isekai fantasy is escapist. The conviction frame is harder but it is the only one that can produce a life.

I do not get a second chance at being 15. I do not get a second chance at not going to college early. I do not get a second chance at telling my grandmother I loved her in a way that mattered. The first chances are gone. The remaining chances are the only chances I have.

This is uncomfortable to accept. It is also load-bearing for everything else in this essay.

The Olympics

If conviction is the engine, the Olympics is the demonstration.

We celebrate the Olympics because the Olympics show us what it looks like when a human points everything they have at one thing. The 100-meter sprinter has spent 15 years training his legs for 9.5 seconds of running. The high jumper has organized her entire life around a single bar. The Olympic athletes are the proof that commendable will is real.

Most of society does not live this way. Most of society lives in normalcy — a comfortable middle distance between not trying at all and trying with everything. Normalcy is the default. Normalcy is also a kind of waste, because the people in it are not pointed at anything.

I do not want to live in normalcy. I have not yet found the thing I am willing to point everything at. The Olympics frame is the frame that tells me there is something out there — a thing — and the work of the next decade is to find it.

When I watch a Faker game or a Federer match or a Tenz Valorant clip, I am watching the same thing. A human pointed at a single craft, for years, in a way that produced something other humans cannot do. The visual is small — a person hitting a ball, a person clicking a mouse — but the structure is large. They built themselves to be this person, on purpose, over a long time.

This is what I think the upper bound of a human life looks like. Not money. Not legacy. Not impact on the world. The construction of a self capable of doing one thing at the highest level.

I want to be that.

I haven't picked the thing yet.

What happiness isn't

I read George Orwell's 1984 recently. The novel is about a totalitarian state that watches its citizens through telescreens. I expected the book to be about surveillance. The book is about surveillance, but it is more about what happens to a population when the regime decides what their emotions should be.

I also read about Soma — the happiness pill in Aldous Huxley's Brave New World. The pill produces a temporary euphoria. The citizens take the pill instead of dealing with anything that is hard.

These books are usually read as political warnings. I read them as warnings about something else: what happiness is, and what it isn't.

Happiness is not the result of taking the pill. The pill produces a feeling. The feeling fades. The pill requires a new pill. The cycle is the trap. Happiness is not the goal.

Happiness is the byproduct of seeing your life beforehand and seeing your life now, and noticing that the now is better. A person who makes $1,000 unexpectedly is happy for a moment because their now-state is $1,000 better than their before-state. The happiness fades because the $1,000 becomes the new baseline. The next $1,000 produces less happiness. The chase is built into the structure.

Misery is the opposite. Misery is the awareness that the now is worse than what it could have been. I feel miserable when I don't get the job done. I feel miserable when I spend an hour not being able to do the tasks I was assigned. I could have done something in that same period of time, and now that I look back on it, it's time I'll never get back.

The pursuit of happiness is the pursuit of an emotional state. The pursuit of meaning is the pursuit of a life that, when you look back at it, you don't regret. These are different pursuits. One is solved by Soma. The other isn't.

I am after the second one.

The gravestone test

The clearest version of the meaning-of-life question I have arrived at is what I call the gravestone test.

When you die, the question that matters is not how many people came to your funeral. The question is what was the quality of impact you had on the people who did come.

Did you spend extra hours making more money, or did you spend extra hours raising your child so they could understand the love and principles you wanted to pass down?

Did you take the work trip, or did you sit with your grandmother and ask her about her life before you knew her?

Did you optimize for legacy — for how many people would remember you — or did you optimize for depth — for how deeply the people who actually knew you would feel your absence?

I am 19 and I am already running this test on my own life. The test fails most days. I spend hours building products that may not work. I spend more time at my laptop than I do with my mom when she visits. I have not yet figured out the balance.

But the test is the test. It is the closest thing I have to a north star. The quality of impact on the specific people I care about.

This is a smaller frame than change the world. I think it is more honest. Change the world is the framework of a 22-year-old founder who is mostly avoiding the harder work of being a son and a brother and eventually a husband. Quality of impact on the specific people I care about is the framework of an adult who has noticed that the people in his life are real and finite and won't be there forever.

My grandmother Halmeoni died in September of last year. I was late with her. I had been doing the surface I love you, I love you too for 19 years and never went deeper. At the funeral I went looking for the moment I had told her I loved her in a way that meant it, and I could not find one.

That is the moment I started running the gravestone test on the rest of my life. The people I am still in time with — my mom, my dad, my brother Justin, my aunt Komo, Habagi in Seoul, my Fat Grandpa in Taiwan, my cousin Grace, my cousin Ellia — are the people the test is about. The work I do is meaningful to the extent that I am building a life where the test passes for them. The work is meaningless to the extent that I am building a life where the test fails.

This is not a small frame. It is the frame that contains every other frame.

Don't live in a box

There is a related thing I want to say, because it has been in the back of my mind for a year.

I admire Leonardo da Vinci.

The reason I admire him is not the Mona Lisa. The reason is that he was a painter and a sculptor and an inventor and an engineer and an anatomist. He did not put himself in a box. He let his curiosity run across domains. He saw connections most specialists couldn't see, because his attention had been everywhere.

In my generation we are told to specialize early. Business is business. CS is CS. Engineering is engineering. The box is the path. You pick the box at 18 and stay in it for the rest of your life.

I think this is a mistake. I think the box is a recent invention and a bad one. The people who do the most interesting work I read about are the people who refuse to stay in the box — Patrick Collison and his Pioneer thing on top of Stripe. Naval and his philosophy career on top of AngelList. The founders who become writers. The writers who become founders. The artists who become engineers.

I am trying to live across the box. I am at Foster studying business and accounting. I am also reading philosophy and writing essays and building AI agent infrastructure and drafting a marketing thesis and writing letters to my 13-year-old cousin. The box says I should pick one. I am picking all of them.

This will look like dilettantism for the first few years. Eventually, if I do it right, the parts will compound. The marketing thesis will feed the agent infrastructure. The agent infrastructure will fund the letters. The letters will sharpen the marketing. The cross-pollination is the point.

The Leonardo move is not a guarantee. Most people who try it become dilettantes and never produce anything. But the alternative — the box — is also not a guarantee. Most people in the box become competent specialists who never produce anything original either. The expected value is similar. The variance is different. The box has lower variance. The Leonardo move has higher variance and higher upside.

I am taking the Leonardo move. I think it pairs with the gravestone test. The box optimizes for legacy. The Leonardo move optimizes for the quality of being a particular human across multiple domains. The Leonardo move is closer to the gravestone test answer.

The box of memories

The last frame I want to leave you with is the smallest and the one I think about the most.

Life is a box of memories. The box has finite space. For every memory you put in, eventually something else gets pushed out. Time is the constraint.

This means every day is a decision about what goes in the box.

If I spend Saturday watching anime, the Saturday goes into the box as watched anime. If I spend Saturday at Costco with my mom, the Saturday goes into the box as Costco with mom. Both are real. Both are now permanent. Anime Saturday will fade. Costco with mom will not fade as quickly, and when my mom is gone, the Costco Saturday will become a memory I am grateful I made.

The decision is being made every day. I am not always conscious of it. Most days I make the anime Saturday decision by default because the anime is more immediately appealing and the Costco is less so. But the box is filling up either way. The contents are the contents.

The meaning of life, in the box-of-memories frame, is populate the box with the things you will be glad you put in.

This sounds obvious. It is not. Most days I make the wrong choice. Most weeks I lose hours to brain rot that go into the box as nothing — flavorless filler that I would not choose if I could see the box at age 60. The conscious version of the choice is hard because the unconscious version is so easy.

What I am trying to do is bring the choice into consciousness. Is this Saturday the kind of Saturday I will want in the box when my mom is no longer alive? The framing is heavy. It is also the framing that produces a different choice.

Where I am with it

The answer to what is the meaning of life — at 19, on this site, having thought about it for two years — is:

Experience life. With the people you care about. With the quality of attention that, when you look back at it, you will be glad you spent.

Not legacy. Not money. Not changing the world. Quality of impact on the people I care about.

This is small. It is also the only answer I can defend.

The work I am doing — the products I am building, the essays I am writing, the renunciation cycles I am still inside of — is in service of this answer. Every product is meaningful to the extent that it lets me afford the time for the people. Every essay is meaningful to the extent that the writing helps me become a person worth spending time with. Every promise I make in a journal at 1 AM is real to the extent that it moves me closer to being the kind of human my mom would be proud to have raised.

This is the position. The meaning of life is the quality of impact on the people you care about. The way to deliver that quality is to experience life with them, with attention, with the awareness that the box is filling up either way.

Thank you, Lord, for today. Thank you, Lord, for tomorrow.

If we look back at this moment in ten years, I hope we are happy with what we put in the box.

Filling the box on purpose, slowly.

Sources: Letter Five to Grace (the dropshipping arc, Warren Buffett / accounting major, 200 books in Odegaard) + Letter Six to Grace (Halmeoni's funeral, the gravestone realization) + Purpose (11/18) (Nov 19 2025, "convince people to make the right one") + My purpose (Apr 28 2026) + (12/31) - I am an athlete (the Olympics frame) + (1-9) (Jan 9 2026, the lonely chapter prayer) + (12-24) - Founder (the three most important decisions — where to live, what to do, with whom to do it) + My 2030 vision (Apr 23 2026, the Leonardo da Vinci frame implicit in the cross-domain bet) + (2024 Book learnings) scan (the Buddha argument, money frameworks) + the May 2026 transcript on meaning + 1984 / Brave New World references from his reading.