In a world where the only constant is time, everything is changing. Everything is dynamic and in a constant state of flux. And yet, time itself seems strangely still, watching everything, eroding everything, devouring everything. It feels as though time is the devourer of all things. Either things exist within time, or they do not exist at all.
Within this brief span of time, we begin to reflect on our own existence. I do not know when, in this infinite landscape of time, humanity became self-aware. But once it did, it began asking unsettling questions. Is time a construct we created to make sense of change, or do we exist within time as something that precedes and outlasts us? These questions led thinkers like Saint Augustine to claim that essence precedes existence, that meaning is given before life is lived. Centuries later, Sartre rejected this idea entirely, arguing that existence precedes essence and that meaning is something we create only after we arrive in the world.
This framing, however, misses the point. As Martin Heidegger argues in Being and Time, we do not exist as isolated entities, nor do we stand outside time observing it. We exist in relation to other beings, to the world around us, and within time itself. Nothing exists purely on its own. Being is relational, contextual, and situated in time. And it is precisely this realization, that time devours all things and that our existence is finite, which serves as the real nudge toward living fully. Not despite finitude, but because of it.
If we ask what a full life actually is, or whether it is even attainable, there may be no definitive answer. But the question itself can be approached through an amalgamation of philosophical perspectives, each interacting with the others in a constant state of flux. Living fully appears to be a balancing act. It is a balance between selfish needs and the effort to move beyond purely personal values. It is a balance between deriving meaning from the world and from our own actions. And it is a balance between individual purpose and participation in society, because at the end of the day, we are social beings. Meaning does not emerge in isolation. It is shaped through interaction, responsibility, and context.
Existence, then, is something half-empty. Not in a pessimistic sense, but in an honest one. It is an awareness of the need to be, not merely to be self-aware. It is an awareness that our time is limited, that time devours all things, and that within this constraint we must balance personal values, needs, wants, and desires with the society that sustains us. That society, in turn, must grow in order to support the individual. Perhaps a full life is nothing more, and nothing less, than this. A conscious balancing act carried out within a short span of existence, under the quiet pressure of time.
