[📚] There Is No Worthless Experience, Only the Gift of Meaning-Making

✨ Summary by Gemini 2.5 Pro 　

A day of deep reflection on how even past experiences that once seemed useless can be reborn as present value through the thought process of ‘meaning-making,’ and on how what matters is not one specific method but the process of finding one’s own answer and gaining the energy to live.

• Original: http://blog.naver.com/hyeogikarp/223869037554
• Naver publication time: 2025/05/17 23:11 KST
• Original category: Self-development

Original Post

🗓️ Date: 2025.5.17 Sat

✨ Summary by Gemini 2.5 Pro

A day of deep reflection on how even past experiences that once seemed useless can be reborn as present value through the thought process of ‘meaning-making,’ and on how what matters is not one specific method but the process of finding one’s own answer and gaining the energy to live.

💭 Diary

A “worthless experience” is only an experience whose meaning has not yet been discovered.

Meaning-making is the act of connecting the countless dots of my life through the lens I have chosen, drawing my own constellation from those connections, and gaining the courage to keep living.

For any experience, what matters is the attitude of thinking in order to find meaning within it. The fundamental reason humans were able to become Earth’s top predator was probably, more than anything else, our capacity for thought and our ability to apply that thought to reality.

Everyone dreams of happiness. But when asked to define the concept of “happiness,” no one can easily give a clear answer. That is because language is, at its core, only a social agreement that maps “a certain kind of meaning” to a specific “word.” In the end, abstract concepts inevitably have individual interpretations and cannot be shared by everyone with a perfectly identical meaning.

Even so, humans are highly intellectual beings who can feel happiness and live only when they assign meaning to life for themselves. If each person cannot find a meaning for life in their own way, enough to accept it, it becomes difficult to live happily in this world that is sometimes full of pain and chaos.

The past version of me could not even have imagined it. Starting in 2020, I would begin attending church because of my older brother’s suggestion. And in that new environment called church, all the knowledge and experience I had built up in games, composition, development, broadcasting, and YouTube, which had seemed “useless,” would become incredibly useful for the ministry work I took on.

(If I were to deliberately give this a Christian meaning, I “believe” that all of it was ultimately part of the bigger picture of “God’s guidance.” Why? Because believing that “sincerely” makes the present me “sincerely” happier. I plan to talk about this topic in more detail later.)

In this way, a “worthless experience” is only an experience whose meaning has not yet been discovered. Conversely, an “experience given meaning” becomes a “valuable experience.” Then what is the starting point for the work of assigning meaning to every moment of my life? It is “thought,” and deep “reflection.”

I see religion as either the peak of that meaning-making process or a very powerful tool within it. Going further, among many religions, I think Protestant Christianity may be the most accessible, easy, and popular religion, while also being dangerous precisely because of that point. And to make one honest statement here: I do not think even 1% that the religion serving as this tool of meaning-making must necessarily be “Protestant Christianity,” or that the path I want to walk is the “only path.”

What matters is not the specific form or doctrine of a religion, but the process itself: each person deeply assigning meaning to their own life and experiences, and through that, finding “their own answer” that can give them the energy to live. For some people, that may take the form of religion; for others, it may appear as philosophy, conviction, service, art, or something else.

If you can recognize that even the statement “I am a living person” is only a belief, and if you realize what kind of meaning that belief assigns, then you may be able to agree to some extent with my thought that “perhaps all of us are religious people of countless kinds.”

So in the end, isn’t meaning-making the act of connecting the countless dots of my life through the “lens” I have chosen, drawing my own constellation from those connections, and gaining the courage to keep living? The belief that even past experiences that “seemed useless” can eventually become shining points in that constellation: that may be the greatest gift this act of “meaning-making” gives us.

✨ KPT Comment by Gemini 2.5 Pro (Persona: Jaemin)