I am impressed that you were willing to ask the question in this forum - I don't know how many 17 year old readers we have here, but I suspect you are in a minority. This demonstrates your willingness to look for answers in unexpected places, so good for you! I am afraid, however, I agree with Prof. Stairs and want to urge caution before embarking on such a journey, which might sound to your ears so conventional and unenlightened it may be hard to hear. While you are right that it is still possible to find a path less traveled and do well in life, it seems to be increasingly rare. There are many social/economic reasons for this and over which you have little control. While the human spirit of adventure and the lure of a life lived well and fully will never die, the historical moment in which you find yourself is remarkably different than it was for your predecessors. For example, my father did very well with only one year of post high-school education, and he earned far more than I will with my...

It may disappoint you but I do not have an answer for you - existential nihilism sounds dangerous to the heart and mind, so I guess I've avoided it. Let me pose a question: if you or I cannot point to the locus of meaning or value does it imply non-existence? To a certain extent, all value claims are faith claims of a sort: even the market "value" of crude oil is based on faith in unseen and unforeseeable forces. We feel its effects and some of us place a great deal of stock in the reality of this force, but in what sense is it real? Perhaps meaning-making is both discovered and created. To be concrete, the value of "love" is not verifiable or objective in a material sense. And yet, I do not accept that this is my creation alone, nor is it pure discovery of an objective meaningful reality. Perhaps there is a meeting place of subjective and objective "reals" that we bump into that are irreducible to categories of existence or non-existence. I find Charles S. Pierce to be helpful here,...