It’s late and the house is quiet, and I’m thinking about whether life has a mathematical definition at all or if that’s just my brain trying to impose structure where there might be none, because the way we talk about meaning makes it sound like a single number you’re supposed to compute and report, when maybe it’s closer to a property of a system or a mapping that only makes sense relative to its inputs and constraints, like being born with a starting value and a set of boundary conditions you didn’t choose and then iterating forward step by step with noise constantly injected, trying to optimize something like happiness or fulfillment only to discover the landscape is non-convex, full of local maxima that feel good enough to trap you there, while the global maximum is either unknown or doesn’t exist, and different disciplines respond to this in predictable ways, religion insisting there must be a closed-form solution, science settling for numerical approximations, philosophy questioning whether the problem itself is well-posed, and mathematics quietly asking whether the axioms you’re using are even consistent, which makes free will feel less like magic and more like what it’s like to live inside a system that might be deterministic but is computationally intractable from the inside, so choice feels real even if, in principle, it isn’t, and death starts to resemble a singularity where the function simply isn’t defined beyond a certain point unless the space itself is extended, and maybe meaning isn’t an answer at all but the act of proving something true just because it must be true once you see it, or maybe life is a long proof where no one tells you the theorem and you spend your time writing lemmas you hope will matter, with the uneasy thought that you might just be an intermediate step in a much larger argument, even though tomorrow morning you still have to wake up and get on with it anyway.