When Lemony Snicket wrote “Life is a conundrum of esoterica” he was not trying to sound clever. Maybe, just maybe, he was trying to quietly rearrange our understanding of the world. I don’t know, but he, for sure, was telling the truth the way children’s books sometimes do, with a disarming softness that masks how heavy the meaning is.
Life, by design, does not make sense. Not fully. Not consistently. Not in any way that feels… fair. We learn quite early on that any answers are highly unreliable and that “certainty in life” is a foreign language spoken by people who have not lived long enough to doubt everything yet. But why, oh why, does the world keep pretending that everything is logical if only you are smart enough or disciplined enough or optimistic enough? It is not.
The older we grow, the more it obvious it is (in a terrifying way) that life is not a straight line. It’s not even a squiggle. What it is, is a maze! And half the walls are invisible. You bump into things you cannot name, feel things you cannot explain, and are expected to carry wisdom before you even know where the exits are. That is the conundrum. The confusion woven into the architecture of existence.
But it is the esoterica that stings deeper. The sense that other people seem to know something you do not. That the world is coded and you missed the briefing. That life is full of hints, symbols, unanswered riddles, things that feel like they were written for someone else; like they get an open-book exam but you need to rote-learn everything. There are lessons that arrive years too late and moments that only make sense retrospectively. Sometimes it feels like everyone else has exclusive access, a AAA pass, a VIP ticket, to a manual you were never given.
The beauty of this quote is simple. It tells you you are not stupid for struggling, nor dramatic for being overwhelmed. Life is complicated because it was built that way. Half of it feels like science. Half of it feels like myth. And most of it feels like a challenge you are meant to solve without being shown all the clues.
This is not meant to discourage you.
It is meant to free you.
You are not failing at life.
You are participating in its puzzle.
The conundrum.
At its core, a conundrum is a problem without a clean solution. Something too tangled to pull apart neatly. That is essentially the human condition. You spend your life navigating paradoxes that contradict each other while expecting you to live harmoniously inside them. You are told to be soft but strong, ambitious but patient, independent but available, confident but humble, expressive but not overwhelming.
Everything is a negotiation.
Nothing is simple.
And the rules keep changing.
The conundrum is built into the smallest moments. Choosing a career without knowing who you will become. Falling in love without knowing whether the other person will hold you carefully or accidentally break something important. Making decisions that shape your entire future based on fragments of understanding. Life demands courage without offering certainty.
It is confusing because you are living in motion. You understand yourself only after the version of you who made the decision has already changed. You are solving a puzzle whose pieces evolve as you touch them.
That is not incompetence.
It is the architecture of being alive.
The esoterica.
Esoterica is knowledge reserved for the initiated. Insight that cannot be taught, only lived into. It suggests that certain truths about life only reveal themselves after you have earned them through experience, heartbreak, mistakes, and time.
There is a reason elders laugh gently when young people talk about certainty. It is not mockery. It is recognition. They know what you will eventually learn. That the world is full of invisible lessons. That some things cannot be explained. Only felt.
Esoterica is the quiet wisdom you discover in the aftermath.
The sudden clarity after a long confusion.
The way heartbreak teaches you self knowledge.
The way failure teaches you resilience.
The way grief teaches you love in reverse.
There are secrets you unlock simply by staying alive long enough. This is not elitism. It is evolution. You gain access to understanding the way a tree gains rings. Slowly. Quietly. Through weather.
The world sometimes feels secretive because understanding is not universal. People learn different things at different paces. Pain makes some people older than their age. Joy keeps others younger than their past. You are not behind. You are simply gathering the knowledge that belongs to your path.
This is why the quote feels so strangely comforting.
It admits that confusion is not failure.
It is initiation.
The whole point.
You are not meant to understand everything. If life were straightforward, it would not transform you. The confusion forces introspection. The obscurity forces curiosity. The mystery forces courage.
You learn meaning by living, not by theorising.
You understand yourself by breaking, not by planning.
You grow into your wisdom the same way you grow into your height.
Slowly, then all at once, then unevenly again.
Life is a conundrum of esoterica not because it is malicious but because it is layered. You peel back one truth only to find another beneath it. You solve one puzzle and create a new one in the process. That is not chaos. That is depth.
The world is not designed to be mastered.
It is designed to be discovered.
And the discovery never ends.
The older you get, the more you realise that everyone is confused. Everyone is improvising. Everyone is translating their life in real time with incomplete grammar. Nobody has it figured out. Some people are just better at acting like they do.
The esoterica of life is not hidden knowledge.
It is simply the understanding you gain once you stop pretending clarity is the goal.
Life will always be confusing.
But confusion does not mean you are lost.
It means you are learning.
So if everything feels too complicated, too coded, too much, remember this.
The world was built to be puzzling.
Understanding was meant to be slow.
And you were never meant to navigate any of it perfectly.
You are not failing the conundrum.
You are living it.
And that alone is enough to count as mastery.
For more writing that holds your hand through the confusion, more late-night-thought essays that feel like someone finally put your chaos into sentences, stay with Her Campus at MUJ.
This is Niamat Dhillon at HCMUJ, signing off not with answers, but with a reminder:
You’re not meant to solve life. You’re meant to live it, bravely, clumsily, beautifully, exactly as you are.