Back when I was a Religious Studies major, a senior seminar left me with a question that still hasn't let go:

what makes a site sacred?

sacred or profane

Look at a church. A mosque. A temple. What makes that building special? Is it the materials? The architecture? The people inside? The intention behind it?

If you look at the dilapidated ruins of an ancient temple, overgrown and forgotten—is it still sacred? If you look at a pristine megachurch tightly coupled with the prosperity gospel and capitalist incentives—is that sacred?

Maybe all it takes is a declaration. One person, or the sum of many, agreeing that this place is set apart. If enough people believe in it, does a place gain power?

And if so—why?

The accumulation of belief. The attribution of shared story. The layering of meaning across generations. But here's the unsettling corollary: if an entire religious population disappears and nobody is left to believe, do the sacred sites lose their sacredness? Do they become mere objects—stone, wood, glass?

There's no clean answer. It's a theological quandary that stays with you.

the connective tissue

Yuval Harari made an argument in Sapiens that I keep returning to: the distinguishing factor between us and other animals is our ability to carry and share stories across huge populations. Not just any stories—belief systems. Shared narratives that allow millions of strangers to cooperate.

When a lawyer waves his ballpoint pen, he declares into law a whole new set of behaviors—and we comply. Not because of the pen, but because we all agree on a shared story about what law is and who has authority to wield it. A courtroom is just a room. But we've agreed it's something more.

Or take a brand like Peugeot. What is Peugeot? Is it the logo? The person who started it? The factories? A car itself? You can't point to one thing. It's all of these simultaneously—and also none of them individually. The pieces come together into something not just greater in magnitude, but fundamentally different from the sum of its parts.

Same with a sacred site. No single element makes it sacred. The architecture doesn't do it alone. The people don't do it alone. But together, bound by shared story, something emerges that transcends the physical.

The connective tissue is the collective belief.

One of the strangest fixtures of being human: we can share stories, imbue objects and places with meaning far beyond their function, and in doing so, make them real. Not real in the physics sense. Real in the only sense that matters to a human life.

what's the point

Sometimes I walk through my own life and think—what is the point of all this?

Is my life precious when I am one of many billions? Does it matter whether what I write reaches people? What's the significance of making money, having influence, continuing to work? Other than survival. Other than the dopamine rush of the hamster wheel—fancier experiences, nicer hotels, better food.

I won't deny that money helps. With the right foundation, more money means more freedom and an easier path to happiness. That's real. But it's almost a cliché at this point: once you reach a certain level of wealth, you arrive at so what? You still carry all the anxieties, the troubles, the restlessness.

Jim Carrey said he wished everybody could become rich and famous so they could understand how meaningless and pointless it is. He's not wrong. Maybe not the full truth—but a real piece of it.

It's easy to arrive at pointlessness. The arguments are right there. Life is incidental. Free will may not exist. Everything we do is predestined by the mechanics of biology. There is no objective meaning stitched into the fabric of reality.

And yet.

I believe therefore it is

Descartes said I think therefore I am. But maybe the more useful formulation is: I believe therefore it is.

If our chosen stories can make a place sacred—truly sacred, in a way that shapes how millions of people live—then perhaps our chosen stories about whether life is precious do the same thing. Perhaps the meaning of your life is also a choice.

Not a fact you discover. A story you build.

It's easier to build that story when you're surrounded by others who believe it too. Shared belief has gravitational pull. Individual belief has to generate its own. And neither side—meaning or meaninglessness—can definitively win.

So the question becomes: which story has more utility? Which belief leads to more openness, more aliveness, more alignment with how you actually want to live?

When we choose to imbue a place, a religion, a brand, a life with meaning—it becomes so. Whether in the scope of only your own mind or the scope of society at large.

And maybe the most human thing about us is that the choice is ours.