I have recently seen the opinion that one way to live a meaningful life is to decide "what not to do" instead of what to do.

Engineers (especially software engineers) have been warned again and again about "reinventing the wheel," a term that refers to "taking something that has already been completed and making it again on your own.

My attitude toward the above has always been consistent.

"hmm"

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Today, in lecture, we were solving Dijkstra and modified label methods as the shortest path problem, using paper and an empit.

After a long time, I was impressed by the beauty of the solution.

I had even coded both the Dijkstra and Warchal Floyd methods on my own.

However, there are plenty of such routing problem algorithms and others on the Internet, and there are also extensive free libraries.

What I am doing is typical 'reinventing the wheel' -- so I guess this is 'futile'.

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However, I had coded those algorithms on my own and was free to modify them.

Thanks to that modification, I devised an algorithm to calculate how a city of one million people went from train schedule havoc caused by a suicide jump to convergence in five minutes, and got one peer-reviewed paper through.

Also, if I were to decide "what not to do" instead of what I should do, the diaries and columns I have been keeping would be "terminated immediately" at that point.

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Well, I guess my life is not very meaningful or meaningful -- but that's OK with me.

I will die muttering, 'I have truly lived a meaningless and futile life'.