The Penguin That Walked Toward the Mountains: But Why?
There’s a clip from a nature documentary that keeps resurfacing online and, right now it has again taken entire social media by a storm: A single penguin breaks away from its colony and waddles not toward the ocean - where food and survival wait - but inland, toward the mountains. The narrator explains, with detachment, that nothing can be done. The penguin will walk until it dies.
The internet can’t stop talking about it. Not because it’s shocking, but because it feels familiar.
The Chaos We’ve Built
We live in an age of infinite advice. Podcasts tell us to optimize our mornings. Threads explain how to build passive income. Reels promise the secret to happiness in sixty seconds. Philosophers from Camus to Frankl have already mapped the territory of meaning, absurdity, and purpose. The wisdom exists. The frameworks are there.
So why are we still confused? Why do we still feel like that penguin, walking away from everything that makes sense?
I think it’s because we’re caught between two opposing forces: the pressure to pursue what’s allowed, and the whisper that none of it matters anyway. Social media has turned existence into a performance. You’re supposed to hustle, grow, network, build your brand. You’re supposed to find your passion, monetize your hobbies, document your journey. The mandate is clear: do something productive with your time until you die.
And if you’re not doing that? If you’re stuck on survival - on the bottom rungs of Maslow’s hierarchy, scrambling for stability or love or basic belonging - then you’re failing twice. Once at thriving, and once at even having the luxury to ask what thriving means.
The penguin clip triggered something because it named what we feel but don’t say: maybe the real crisis isn’t choosing the right path. Maybe it’s that we’ve lost the courage to choose our poison at all.
Everything Kills You Eventually
Here’s the uncomfortable truth: time will take you regardless of what you do with it. You can walk toward the ocean or toward the mountains. You can grind yourself into productivity or drift into hedonism. You can chase meaning or reject it entirely. The outcome is the same.
Camus called this the absurd - the gap between our need for meaning and the universe’s indifference. His solution was to imagine Sisyphus happy, to rebel against meaninglessness by living fully anyway. Frankl, who survived concentration camps, said meaning isn’t found but created - through love, through work, through suffering chosen consciously.
Beautiful ideas. But they’re hard to hold onto when you’re scrolling at 2 a.m., watching people younger than you achieve more, watching the world burn in real-time, watching your own ambitions shrink under the weight of rent and exhaustion and the creeping sense that you’ve already missed your chance.
The advice exists. The frameworks exist. But courage? That’s harder to come by.
Selling Ourselves Short
I think the meaninglessness that haunts us - this shadow that follows even in daylight - comes from selling ourselves short. Not because we’re lazy or weak, but because we’re scared.
Scared to pursue something bigger than ourselves. Scared to fail at it. Scared that if we aim for something meaningful and miss, we’ll be left with nothing. So we settle. We take the safer path. We tell ourselves that passion is a privilege, that survival is enough, that we’ll get to the bigger questions later.
But “later” keeps receding. And the shadow keeps getting bigger with each passing day.
They say meaning is something you create, that it comes from within. I think that’s only half true. For me, meaning emerges when I make sense of the world - when I can name what I see, articulate what I feel, and offer that understanding to others. If someone reads what I write and thinks, yes, that’s it, or uses my way of seeing to navigate their own confusion, that’s enough. That would be enough.
But here’s the catch: this pursuit doesn’t pay rent. Or maybe it does, and I haven’t figured out how yet. Maybe I haven’t tried hard enough, or in the right way. Maybe I’m rationalizing my own fear.
Whatever the case, I know this: refusing to give in to the rut is a pleasure in itself.
Read these:
“I know I might fail at it miserably.”
“What will my parents and family think?”
“Others have chosen the safe, predictable path, why shouldn’t I?”
“I need to be realistic about money.”
“I’m already too late, people younger than me have already done it.”
“What if I waste years and have nothing to show for it?”
“I don’t have the right credentials/background/network.”
“Once I’m more stable, then I’ll pursue what I actually want.”
“What if I succeed and realize it wasn’t what I wanted after all?”
“I have responsibilities, I can’t be selfish right now.”
“The world doesn’t need another person doing this.”
“I’m not talented enough to make it work.”
“What if people think I’m delusional?”
“I should focus on what I’m already good at.”
“It’s too competitive, the market is saturated.”
“I’ll regret giving up the security I have now.”
“What if I let everyone down?”
“Maybe wanting more is just privilege, I should be grateful for what I have.”
You see the game your mind plays?
It chases the predictable, rehearses the worst-case scenario before you've even started. It's a defense mechanism, maybe - preparing you for impact. But here's what makes it unbearable: imagine that voice amplified a hundred times. That's what you're actually fighting against. Not the external obstacles, not the practical challenges of making something work, but this internal arithmetic that calculates failure before you've taken a single step. And when you do that math honestly, the chances of winning seem so small that staying still starts to look like wisdom. That's the trap. That's how the rut wins - not by convincing you that you'll fail, but by convincing you that imagining failure is the same as protecting yourself from it.
Choosing Your Suffering
There’s a certain freedom in realizing that all paths involve suffering. The question becomes: what do you want to suffer for?
You can suffer building something that matters to you, even if it fails. You can suffer learning something difficult, even if no one cares. You can suffer pursuing a vision that might never materialize, because the pursuit itself is the point.
Or you can suffer passively - dragged along by circumstance, by algorithms, by the expectations of people you don’t even respect. You can suffer from regret, from the slow accumulation of compromises, from the distance between who you are and who you wanted to be.
The internet has made it harder to tell the difference. We confuse needs with wants. We confuse visibility with value. We confuse motion with progress.
But there’s clarity in asking: am I learning because I want to, or because I think I should? Am I building something because it excites me, or because it fits a template of success? Am I suffering because I chose this, or because I’m afraid to choose anything else?
The Penguin’s Choice
Maybe the penguin wasn’t confused. Maybe it knew exactly what it was doing. Maybe, for reasons we can’t comprehend, the mountains called to it more than the ocean did.
We project our existential dread onto it because we recognize the impulse: to walk away from what we’re supposed to want, toward something inexplicable. The narrator says nothing can be done, but maybe that’s the point.
Maybe the tragedy isn’t the penguin’s death. Maybe it’s living a life prescribed entirely by survival, never once walking toward your own mountains.
The internet amplifies everything - the pressure, the comparison, the noise. But it also amplifies the question at the heart of being human: what do you do with the time you have?
I don’t have the answer. I’m still figuring out my own path. But I know that not giving in to the rut - choosing my suffering, learning what I want to learn, building what I want to build - feels more honest than pretending the prescribed path will save me.
The penguin walked toward the mountains. Maybe that’s not madness. Maybe that’s the only sane response to a world that insists there’s only one direction worth going.
But instead of blaming the world, why don't we focus inwards and build the courage to choose a path and walk on it?
Because choosing means accepting that you might walk for years toward your mountain and find nothing there. No vindication, no audience, no proof you were right. Just you, the path you chose, and the uncomfortable truth that it might not have mattered to anyone but you - and even that might not be enough.