It may not always seem like it sometimes to the people who know me, but I care a lot. I internalize a great deal of concern for other people and their struggles. Everything I have gone through in my life has given me a perspective of compassion for others who have it as bad or worse as I did. Because of that, I want the people around me to know that I honestly and truly care for them and to see me as a resource for their struggles. I love helping in any way that I can, and it fills me with a sense of joy when I help set someone up on the right path or help to ease their struggles.
With that being said, I often just don’t give a fuck. Not in a cold, dismissive way, but in a healthy, objective way. I don’t give a fuck what people say about me or how they view me. I certainly don’t give a fuck about rules or the usual ways of doing things. And I don’t give a fuck about the constant shit storm of nonsense from negative, unhelpful people. I have no time or energy to waste on that kind of shit.
Now, me caring and me not giving a fuck might sound like a contradiction, but I think there is a fine line between caring too much and not giving a fuck and it is a line that we should all walk, because leaning too much to one side strips something important from us. If we care too much we get lost in doing everything for everyone else and we get sucked into an empathy vortex where we confuse our own emotions and struggles for the emotions and struggles of others. We end up getting lost along with them. In the same way, if we never give a fuck, we never have the opportunity to help others and to lend our experience and advice and energy to helping them in a way that makes our life more meaningful and full of service to others.
So how do we live in that space between caring too much and not giving a fuck?
Put yourself first.
Sometimes, being selfish is the most selfless thing you can do. Cleaning up your own mental or physical garbage is the best way that you can serve others in a way that makes your service meaningful and authentic. Most of us who care a lot about others, and the world, make a habit of putting other people first and we often suffer because of it. We give away too much of our money or time or energy to others and we are left drained and deflated. That is why it is so important to sometimes, more often than not in fact, put your needs above the needs of others. You can’t fix anything for anyone else if you don’t fix the things that are wrong with you so, fuck it; be selfish sometimes. Say no. Cut people off who are sucking you dry and come back to them when you are full enough to withstand their drain. Not only will you have the resources to help them, in the form of finances, patience, or creativity, but you will never leave those interactions totally drained and you will be able to bounce back quicker to do it all again for someone else.
Putting yourself first also means not listening to all the negative bullshit that people throw your way as you start to make some serious changes in your life. It means not giving a shit about the old friendships that don’t serve you and not giving a shit about the flack you get from others as you try to cut out the old habits that are bringing you down. No matter how great the things you are doing someone, somewhere is going to talk shit about them. Don’t give a fuck about that! You care too much about yourself to do that.
Give others what they need, not what they want.
When people approach us they frequently approach us with a solution that they already imagined that you can help them implement. When someone is late on their bills they call and ask for money. They never call and ask how you can help them be more responsible with their finances, they just want money to fix the symptom not the cause. When someone calls and asks you how you lost weight, they want you to give them a quick fix diet or routine that helped you get into shape. They never want to hear about all the hard ass work it takes to drop the extra pounds and to get into shape and they shrug off your invite to the gym, so they never end up succeeding in their weight loss goal. Why? Because you gave them an answer and not a solution. The best thing you can do for people is to know the difference between what they need and what they want. You need to care enough to want to help, but not give a fuck enough to know that what you might offer for help is not what they want to hear, but really need to hear, if they honestly want to change the shit in their lives.
Question everything
I accept a lot of advice from a lot of different people; people who I know are wiser, more accomplished and better at this living thing than I am. I read everything I can get my hands, listen to hours of podcasts – I am a sponge of information because I know the more that I learn, the more fodder I have to work through and to apply to the life I want. I care a lot about learning and growing. With that being said, I don’t give a fuck if some amazing personal development guru gave me some pithy advice that everyone else thinks is brilliant. If that shit doesn’t agree with my common sense, my reason and my purpose then I am dropping it. I make a habit of questioning everything that I read or hear or see because that gets me to a deeper understanding – a personal understanding that works with my path. We can respect and appreciate people without giving a fuck about everything they try to teach us. Not everything is going to work for you and a personal development path is PERSONAL, so you need to find what works for you personally. Don’t just buy into shit blindly because important people said it. Care enough to listen, but give the proper amount of fucks if it doesn’t serve you.
Summary
Living in this space between caring too much and not giving a fuck is a difficult space to inhabit. You have to be constantly vigilant that you are not moving too far one way or the other and that requires a constant evaluation of your motives and intent. You have to be really in tune with what you are trying to get out of your journey and know when you need to slide back towards caring or not giving a fuck. But if you can exist there in that space for long enough, it becomes easier and easier to navigate and the payoffs become larger and larger. Things open up and you are able to balance all that compassion you have for others with all that shit you want to accomplish for yourself and that’s when you start to see the most movement in your world. So go out there and care too much, but have the inner strength to sometimes not give a fuck.
If I had played by the rules, listened to the oddsmakers in my life, and folded my hand when everyone said I was going to lose, I wouldn’t be where I am right now. If I had listened to all the people who said that there was no way I could accomplish what I wanted to accomplish because of my upbringing or my personality or my failures and faults and mistakes, I would be face down in a gutter, or face up in a casket. But I am not, and you know why?
Because despite the fact that the odds have always been stacked against me, I have always found a way to win. Despite the early and frequent hardship that was my life growing up and the occasional disaster I make of it now, I always find a way to get done what needs to get done in order to be the person I want to be and to get the things out of life that I want to get. No matter what the odds are.
How I grew up, the force and pain and loss and viciousness of it, that sticks with you for a long time and it changes the odds for you in everything you do. You carry the weight of a fucked up past everywhere you go and you pull it out often – as an excuse to why you can’t get what you want out of life or as a sympathy card played to give you a reason for your failures or your faults. And people usually accept it. They let you get away with it most times, because a hard life does bring sympathy, but it shouldn’t. A hard life should bring you strength of character and recognition of your progress to get as far as you did, despite the odds against you. It’s not a crutch. It’s a badge of honor.
Recognize that the odds are stacked against you.
Maybe you stacked the odds against yourself through your shitty excuses or your miserable lifestyle choices. Maybe you hit a random patch of terrible circumstances and the odds shifted against you out of pure chance. Whatever the reason, recognize that you are not going to find an easy way towards the life you want and now is the time to go big and bet everything you have on yourself.
Yes. You are now going to have to work harder than most people. You are going to have to get up earlier. You are going to have to put in more time on the hard shit and sacrifice some of the fun shit. You are going to have to cut some things out of your life you really don’t want to be without and you are going to have to introduce some things into your life you really don’t want to introduce, but it is the only way that you are going to change your chances, and that should be all that matters.
Embrace your story.
The stories that people want to hear about others – the stories that keep us on the edge of our seat and that matter and motivate and influence – those stories always have a main character that has the odds stacked against them. Where everything seems so overwhelmingly against them that you are not sure they can come out on top at the end. These are the stories of everyday men and women who came from less than nothing to create empires. Peopl who were beset on all sides by countless complications that should have had them lose time and time again, but they still found a way to win.
Those stories move us because they reflect us. We want to succeed in the same way as the characters in those stories – despite the odds. Those are the stories that we repeat over and over as lessons on how to be successful in life – about how to change the odds no matter how skewed against you they are. Those are the stories that people want to hear.
And that is your story if you do it right. A story of how everything was stacked against you and you still managed to come out the winner.
How do you change the odds?
You start by finding a reason, a way, a method, that works for you to re-stack the deck and get what you want. You don’t make excuses. You don’t complain about the shitty hand you were dealt. You don’t whine when someone else gets what you want. You focus on your own odds and you do what is necessary to change them.
You do the hard work. Practice the discipline. Put in the time. Because you change the odds of success in your life by changing yourself. Just like in sports betting, you change the odds by betting so much on yourself that the bookmakers have no choice but to hedge their bets in your favor because everything suggests that you know something they don’t know. And you do. You know that you are fucking relentless and you have faced worse odds before and came out on top.
So you do the work that makes you better. You get up earlier. You sleep less. You read more. You work out harder.You spend time with people who uplift you – people who are also betting on you. You never stop caring and loving and you never, ever give up on yourself. You don’t fuck around with friends or people or situations that don’t serve your purpose and you stop blaming your situation on your past, or your genetics, or your situation or luck.
What about luck?
Luck is manufactured. You have to generate it yourself. We are so quick to say we can’t succeed because we have no luck. We say that so-and-so got to where they are because they got lucky. They were born at the right time, in the right place, to the right people. They had all the chances and I had none. That is bullshit.
Yes, luck is mostly about being in the right place at the right time with the right people. But that means consistently being in the right place at the right time with the right people. So look around your life right now. Are you in the right place? Is this the right time? Are you with the right people? If you are not, then how the fuck are you going to be in a position for luck to find you?
You need to go find out where your luck is hiding. You need to put yourself into the right situations at the right time with the right people to have a chance to get lucky because that is what it boils down to – giving yourself a chance to be lucky. But that chance comes through hard work.
You don’t see all the hard work, sleepless nights and discipline it takes for so many people to get “lucky”. All you see is the payoff and then you throw up your hands and curse your bad luck because you can’t get the same breaks. In most cases, those breaks weren’t given, they were created. So go create your own luck by putting yourself in the right position to grab it.
What are your odds?
There are a lot of people who are going to try to get between you and your dreams. Your friends. Your teachers. Your family. Random strangers. A lot of people are going to tell you that whatever you are going for in life right now is not within your reach. Whatever you want out of life is not for you because you got dealt a shit hand and you have to accept the cards that you are given. Well lucky for you no one gets to decide where you place your bets in life and you have the opportunity to bet on yourself every time – no matter what your cards are or what the odds are.
Those people who are trying to convince you that you are going to fail have already folded their hands and aren’t in the game anymore, so stop listening to their advice and listen to some advice from a gambler who is still playing the shitty cards he was dealt and occasionally winning a hand or two.
People like me, like a lot of us, we are not expected to succeed. People who come from troubled pasts, who were born into hard situations, who have suffered more than most people should. People who have failed so often and fucked up their life so many times that all that’s left is burned bridges and salted fields – we are not expected to succeed. Because people see the messes we were given, or have made in our lives, and they think that no one can come back from that because they can’t imagine coming back from it.
Well, some people can come back from it. Those of us who have always been counted out. Those of us who are used to having our backs against the wall and nowhere else to go but claw our way forward. Those of us who don’t care what the odds are, as long as we are in the game. Those of us that wear our scars like badges and who have never turned away from the occasionally dirty, disgusting work of living. People like us can take a mistake, can take a beating, can take anything that comes into our lives and turn it to our favor.
And because of that, I am going to buck the odds every time and go for whatever I want in life. I am going to ignore the doubters and the haters and the naysayers and I am going to prove to everyone that has ever waited for me to fail, including myself, that even with the odds stacked against me, there is always a chance. And I will bet on myself and take that chance every time. Win or lose, at least I played my hand.
The word skeptic conjures a host of images. A dour atheist shitting on the miracles and mysteries of the world. A perpetual party pooper that seeks to constantly rain on life’s parade with a shit storm of exposition about why what you believe is wrong, all the while asserting that what they believe is right. I do not sanction this sort of malicious and opinionated brand of skepticism. It goes full circle into dogmatism and allows no room for inquiry.
What I call for is the congenial, good-natured and reasonable sort of skepticism that was championed by men like philosopher David Hume. Hume lived during the Scottish enlightenment between the time of 1711-1776. He is arguably one of the most influential philosophers of the Western world and his brand of philosophical inquiry – one focused on natural, inductive and empirical skepticism – brought about a new way of investigating what we believe to be true and a new way of interrogating the universe in philosophy. A way that can help us live a more open, curious and thoughtful life.
What is skepticism?
If you would be a real seeker after truth, it is necessary that at least once in your life you doubt, as far as possible, all things. – Descartes
The philosophical idea of skepticism was presented long ago by the ancient Greeks and Romans. Men like Phyrro of Elis (360 – 270 B.C.) and Sextus Empiricus (160 – 210 B.C.) thought that we should live in a state of suspended belief about truth claims and called for a life of perpetual inquiry.
What skepticism suggest is that that none of our beliefs about things can ever be sufficiently justified in a way that would constitute true, objective knowledge as we are limited by fallibility of our perceptual understanding and experience of the world. As such, we should not come to fully trust our view of the universe, and our place in it, without constant inquiry into it.
Skepticism is also believing that there is no subject too sacred for rational, reasoned inquiry and that no thing is beyond the suspension of judgment regarding the truth of it.
Skepticism applied in a personal measure to one’s life is the act of questioning things. Of living a life of suspended belief about all things that you have come to assume and constantly putting to question the things that you believe when new evidence arrives that hinders or supports that belief. It is about entertaining and engaging the beliefs and opinions of others, especially as they are contrary to your own, to approach a fuller and deeper understanding of the world.
Why skepticism?
Because belief in something should only be a temporary stop on the journey to truly understanding something. Our beliefs should be malleable things that can be constantly shaped by new information, new truths and new understandings. Belief is never a universal truth. It is a personal truth. Our truth. The one that helps us approach the lives we desire. It is a thing that is true to us in the moment and, should we come across new knowledge that should rightfully steer us in another direction of belief, we should be willing to change course instantly and move in that direction – because that is what life demands of us. Not a stubborn adherence to wrong ideas that were handed down to us and that we think support us, but a willingness to rebuild ourselves when faced with new information that approaches a more reasonable truth.
Every answer that we get from our inquiry into the truth is a revelation of new questions. There is no stopping. No coming to an absolute truth about what we should believe because their should always be that rub of doubt causing a slight discomfort – like a grain of sand rubbing in our shoes – making us uncomfortable with how we arrived at that truth and causing us to doubt whether if we have enough information to be entirely certain of our claim.
We should strive to be in a constant state of suspended belief and eternal inquiry, because once we start fully accepting the things we believe as truth and we cease inquiry into them, we risk being wrong in a way that limits our experiences. We risk becoming dogmatic, inflexible and slaves to uninvestigated beliefs that were come upon by sheer, experiential accident.
So, if we can not be certain of the truth, what should we believe and how should we act?
The short answers is, we believe and act with a semblance of faith. An affective sort of faith that insists upon a tiny leap of existential confidence. We are to have faith in the rigor and exhaustiveness of our search for evidences for our beliefs and, when we truly believe we have approached something of an impartial, albeit incomplete, understanding of these beliefs, we put our faith in our perceptual understanding and we say, this is the truth, for me and for now. But we never put it down and say that truth was found and no longer needs to be looked after.
We should handle our truths and beliefs like possessions that we may one day outgrow; as though they are things we can discard when we are doing the mental housekeeping of personal reflection and deeper reasoning. We return to our truths and beliefs and we rearrange them, aligning them with new evidences we have to support or deny them, and we remain unattached if they must be discarded for new beliefs that are better supported by the new experiences and evidences we have.
Beliefs are all just borrowed things anyway – incomplete possessions pasted together through the shavings and clippings of others ideas that we have come into contact with – and when we are done with the ones we have borrowed in favor of the ones we have created ourselves we should rejoice in the giving back of them, because now we have something that is truly ours. A truth that is true for us, as that is the deepest we can approach the objectivity of knowledge.
But even within our perpetual doubt we should always act from the best available evidence we have at the time regarding what we believe to be true. We should absolutely believe things after we have reasoned well about them, but we should never insist that we have found an absolute truth that is true for all people. Beliefs about things are to be had, but never to be trusted.
And we must always remember to temper the strength of our doubt with the voracity of the claims being made. More extraordinary claims or beliefs will require more extraordinary proofs.
As Hume said, “A wise man, therefore, proportions his belief to the evidence.”
What does this mean? It means we needn’t spend our days constantly doubting that the sun will rise tomorrow. We have sufficient evidence to support the belief that it will rise based upon the inductive evidence that it has done so for as long as we have been alive.
The beliefs that we should constantly choose to doubt and investigate though are the ones that do not carry such obvious evidence. A belief of religious superiority? A belief of political authority? A belief of racial inferiority? A belief of gender or sexual orientation inferiority? These are the things that must be constantly scrutinized, because they are beliefs derived from limited personal experience and are usually second-hand things given to us by friends and family. Those things are not to be trusted without deep investigation as to why they are true.
Summary
A life of skepticism is not a sentence of pessimism or a license to believe nothing. We can have our fun. We can love. We can watch in appreciation the beauty of a languid sunrise. We can love our gods and we can argue over our beliefs as though they are things that can be supported through argument and logic. But we must never come to think that we hold some inalienable truth that grants us any certainty that what we think, what we feel and what we believe, is the truth about how the world actually is and that our truths should be true for everyone else. The perspectives of the world are too varied. So we work an agreeable sort of skepticism – we keep our minds and hearts open but we question everything because everything deserves to be questioned.
If we are to come to reason well in our lives – come to reason and walk away with something resembling our truth – then we must establish the boundaries of our journey. I am not speaking of being so rigorous in our demarcation that we draw a detailed map of where we all should exactly go and how we all should exactly get there. No. I am saying that we must agree to calibrate a compass so that we all understand the directions we have available to us. Where you go from there is up to you.
In the spirit of coordination, I have taken the 10 rules of philosophy, that came from American philosopher Louis Pojman, and I have expanded upon their meaning and related them to my experience of exploring practical philosophy for personal enrichment. These are flexible rules that beg to be bent, but they offer a starting point for our interrogation of the universe and the pursuit of philosophy as a practical way of life.
Allow the spirit of wonder to flourish in your breast.
Wonder is a perpetual state of childlike inquisitiveness and sustained amazement at the world. You must become that child – constantly curious about all the things you see and hear and feel and do – to properly do practical philosophy. You must not be satisfied with the answers that have already been told to you, but defiantly prying into the whys and how’s and what’s of your experience. You must keep a sense of naïvety so that you might approach things as if you had never approached them before and you must investigate them as if you had never investigated them before. That is how you begin philosophy and maintaining that wonder is a means to never stopping philosophy.
Doubt everything until the evidence convinces you of its truth.
A suspension of judgment is a traveler’s gift. A gift for wanderers who are searching for the very deepest things that they most want answers to. It serves you on the road of life, as the freedom to doubt fuels the freedom to further explore and find your reasons. You will come across so many possible answers to the questions of living and a healthy dose of skepticism will help you pull the disguised weeds growing alongside the flowers. A hesitation to believe something leaves you open and vulnerable and never so entrenched in dogma that you might miss a deeper truth because you could not be bothered to see it. Doubt is not uncertainty, it is a healthy certainty that you cannot be entirely certain about anything. Live in doubt until you have dug deep enough in an idea to hit the truth.
Love the truth.
Do not love the truth because it is a high mountain to summit – a pulpit to throw shade down upon the truths of others. Love the truth because it is a safe haven in a yawning morass of unknowns. It is a tiny piece of sturdy land that you have claimed for yourself. It is not necessary for others to see it or appreciate it or know it. Love is a personal thing, after all, and falling in love with the truth is a personal romance. But no matter how much you come to love the truth, do not expect your truth to love you back by staying true and loyal to you through the rest of your life. Truths are fickle lovers. Because of that, you must learn to let go of the truths you once loved, and have now outgrown, for the truths that you lust after now. Never stay too long with a truth that you don’t love. You will always regret it.
Divide and conquer.
Every great problem – philosophical or otherwise – needs to be deconstructed. Pulled apart to its manageable pieces and investigated in that way so that it can be put back together, understood. Philosophy is a lived thing and, just as in life, we take the parts of our problems and we break them down to be able to make any sort of forward progress towards a solution. The big, burdening problems that seem incapable of being solved are usually begging to be broken so that the pieces can be used to understand the whole. Philosophy is a puzzle – find the edges first, the boundary pieces to frame your image of the truth, and then come into the hard to place pieces in the middle. Let the picture develop slow but detailed and confident.
Collect and construct.
And how do we rebuild our deconstructed philosophical problems so that they are strongly fortified, well-reasoned truths that we can come to love and rely upon? We go out into the world, and into the ideas of those that reasoned before us, and we begin to collect and construct our own theories about the world – about life, about love, about politics, about happiness, about everything. We are not gathering dogmatic, unsubstantiated, arbitrary opinions. We are making sure to gather up the facts that seem more true, despite our wish to believe otherwise. We rely upon careful investigation and deliberation to collect and sort. We seek to create a core of well-reasoned beliefs about the world and our place in it and we work to construct ourselves from that beating, burning heart of truth, however small the pulse of it.
Conjecture and refute.
Prove yourself wrong. Find out why what you believe is not the right way to believe. Look for the subtle flaws in your reasoning, question your logic, take the position opposite yours and reason through the faults of your path. If you are doing this whole philosophy thing right, you will be declaring bold things – things that will be contentious and scandalous and challenged. You should find the flaws in your arguments first in order to plug the holes, or jump ship to a different belief should you find the argument is able to hold water. I am not saying be fickle in your belief, I am saying be flexible, and understand that there is always at least one damning argument against whatever it is that you believe to be the truth. Make your way to the enemy’s gate and face it boldly. Do not be scared to be wrong, be scared to not accept that you are wrong. That is the worst sort of mistake a person can make.
Revise and rebuild.
And after all that division and construction, destruction and defeat, you will take all those shattered things and you will rebuild and rewrite your beliefs. Using the remnants of old thought and the hearty planks of new ideas, you can rebuild your beliefs into something more resembling your newly discovered truth. Something sturdy and seaworthy. And it is OK that your truth should change as you go along philosophizing in the world. Truths are not for holding on to so tightly that they cannot be discarded. They are temporary things that see us from point to point and when they lose their worth they are cast aside. Be humble enough to recognize that you hold many false beliefs and be gracious to the ones who show you your errors and turn you towards a deeper, stronger truth.
Seek simplicity.
When all else fails in your reasoning, and you are teetering on the precipice between two potential solutions – one complex and the other simple – approach the path of simplicity. Favor the answers that are the most reasonable and the easiest to believe. The ones that require the fewest leaps of faith. I am not saying there are not times where fantastic answers are the only reasonable response to a question. I am saying that, given the choice between the fantastic and the simply reasonable explanations for a thing, err on the side of simplicity. It is a more fortified position to continue to inquire from. Always continue your inquiry if you are still undecided or unsatisfied, but rest comfortably in simplicity when it is the best available option.
Live the Truth.
It is not enough that we should find the Truth. We must live it. I think there is no choice, actually. You are changed when you stare down the abyss at life’s big questions and stumble through the darkness to find a light of truth. You have no choice but to move then, in a direction dictated by the truth you have found. So we are not thinking just for thinking’s sake and we do not philosophize just for philosophizing’s sake. No. We think to act and to act rightly. We wonder and wander to find – and come to love – the truth so that we can walk beside her, live with her and be the better made for it. We come to be transformed by the truth and surge forward being that much closer to the meanings of our lives because we have another piece of our puzzle put into place. Don’t just desire the truth for truth’s sake, desire it for living’s sake.
Live the Good.
And to be transformed by the truth in this way means to embody the ethics and morality of wisdom and reason. To live a life that reflects the deepest virtue and value that you have found as you searched for the truth. To live in a way that you would expect others to live so as to create a world that is livable at all. We are all walking, talking examples of our implicit desire of how we wish the world would be – how we wish the world would act. We are responsible for creating the direction that we would have the world go by simply acting in the manner that aligns with what we find true and good about the world.
And that is it. That is where we start from. A few simple guidelines to help you begin your practical philosophy journey. Where you go with it is up to you.
For part 2 of my post on the philosophy of personal development, I want to focus on 3 more modern, influential philosophers that have offered a lot in the way of personal development fodder. While touching only a tiny portion of the material available from these philosophers, it focuses heavily on freedom of choice, the pain and process of living and how we can shape our thoughts to become stronger and more mentally resilient. These philosophers approached philosophy as a personal thing. As a means to describe and be in a world that seemed to lack any meaning outside the one we each personally applied to it.
I believe these three philosophers, and the philosophies they presented, are wildly misunderstood. It is true that their lives and thoughts were seemingly tumultuous, sensational and revolutionary, but they chose that style on purpose, as a reflection of their philosophies and the times to which they lived. They tried to live the strength of their philosophies during a period of history that seemed in constant turmoil and destruction. New ideas were being erected everywhere, great and terrible, and the lights of the great ideas needed to be brighter, harsher and more apt to attract attention. So they made them revolutionary and these great ideas broke through the cavernous darkness to shine like beacons to those who were looking for real philosophical answers to real questions about life.
Some of those questions asked then have changed little in all those years and they still require our own answers. How am I to act? How do I accept the things that have happened and grow from them? How do I enjoy my life when it is sometimes so hard to live? Here are a few answers to consider by men who asked the same:
Jean-Paul Sartre – (1905 – 1980)
“Man is condemned to be free; because once thrown into the world, he is responsible for everything he does.”
Jean-Paul Sartre was one of the most influential of the Existential philosophers. He won a nobel prize during his life and, was in fact, the first person ever to turn it down. He was wildly prolific during his life; writing plays, essays, books, news articles and one of the things he is most well know for is the idea of radical freedom and what that means to our responsibility of choice in the world. He presented the idea that we are all working through an emotional struggle of having the responsibility of choice in how we act and that no one is responsible for us or our actions but us.
Scary shit, right? But also pretty fucking powerful for making change. Self determination gives me the ability to constantly redefine the essence of who I am. I am not some fixed, determined thing that has no will or freedom. I, in fact, have complete, terrifying, moral and mental autonomy – radical freedom – and everything I choose is up to me. Not only that, and this might be the scariest part for most people, whatever I choose to do morally or ethically in my life is my implicit recommendation of behavior for the rest of the world. By choosing any action or behavior I am saying that I think all people should act in such a way.
That is some powerful shit! Think about that. The way we act is our mandate to the rest of the world in how we believe that everyone should act. If I am kind, I am suggesting to the world that I believe everyone should be kind. If I am an asshole, I am suggesting to the world that I think it is fine if everyone is an asshole. What we do to others and ourselves we are saying everyone should do to others and themselves!
Personal development is the same thing. Whenever you choose to undertake and stay committed to your personal development path you are telling the world that you think everyone should do the same. When you work hard to achieve your dreams or get your ass back up after you have been knocked down you are telling the rest of the world to scrape the fucking dirt off and do it all again. We have radical freedom to be and do whatever we want, and we keep choosing everyday, telling the world who we are and who we want it to be by doing so. In every moment, we choose our values, we choose what to believe about ourselves and about this world, we choose every fiber of our being, and by choosing for ourselves we are choosing for the world. We are choosing the kind of beliefs, values and life that we believe are worth living for.
Friedrich Nietzsche – (1844-1900)
“That which does not kill us makes us stronger.”
Nietzsche may be one of the most controversial philosophers in modern history. He is well known for taking on the doctrine of the Christian church and decrying the death of God. The heavy thread individualism and call to personal power of his philosophies made it a target of adoption by anarchistic
groups and this attention painted Nietzsche in a very unflattering light, during his time and beyond.
Yes. We do find a recalcitrant and outspoken man willing to bring down the ancient edifices of philosophy and religion in order to erect something more noble in the writings of Nietzsche, but we also find a man searching – grasping – for a love, appreciation and acceptance of life in all things. Even those things that may bring us harm. We find a man who understood that the painful things in our life, physical and mental, are the things that make us who we are and coming to accept that makes all the difference.
In his book, Thus Spake Zarathustra
What Nietzsche means to say is, sometimes we accept or volunteer to take on struggles in order to get to some greater joy or greater good. We can even go a bit further and say that, the only true and solid joy or happiness is that which has been shaped and sharpened through our struggles. We tend to find so much beauty and strength in a hard luck story of someone who had nothing, who struggled to get everything they had, and finally came out on top. Why? Because these are the stories that we can relate to. These are our stories. The ones we tell ourselves and the ones we lived. The hard stories to hear, but the ones with the happy endings we also want to create in our own lives. They fuel our imagination as to what is possible through struggle.
The point is, we shouldn’t be always striving towards happiness in every waking moment. Even if you could attain it, it would be so fleeting and devoid of any real substance that it would cease to have that sharpness it should have.
Sometimes, we should take on those really difficult tasks we know will be a burden in order to attain a happiness that far surpasses our momentary bliss. When we elect to tackle the really difficult stuff – raising a child, being in a relationship, fighting for a cause or making ourselves better people – we are going to endure some suffering and hardship, but in the end we know that that struggle is worth it because the accumulation of all the moments of happiness that can come from taking on something so important will always pile higher that the tiny, fleeting pleasures of empty happiness.
Albert Camus – (1913-1960)
“You will never be happy if you continue to search for what happiness consists of. You will never live if you are looking for the meaning of life.”
Camus is perhaps most well known for taking the ancient Greek myth of Sisyphus, and adapting it to present the apparent meaninglessness of life. The premise is that of a man, Sisyphus, condemned for eternity to push a boulder up a mountain day after day, only to watch it fall again when he reaches the top. This futile, empty and meaningless existence is a reflection of the futile struggles of our own lives. We work, we love, we help others, we set and achieve goals, only to have it all undone by time or death or circumstances beyond our control. We build our castles in the sand and the tide comes and washes it all away. There is no reprieve from this fate. Time will inevitably erode all of our efforts no matter what we do. That’s fucking depressing, right?
Well it doesn’t have to be and Camus didn’t intend it to be. You see, there is a personal development silver lining in all this absurd and empty struggle of life. It is the lost nugget of personal development wisdom that Camus wanted everyone to take away from his absurd philosophy and it is this – despite the fact that life seemingly amounts to nothing in the end, that does not mean it is not worth living. What’s more, there is an infinite amount of pleasure and joy to be had from living if you know where to look.
If life is just some hollow, empty struggle that is undone in the end how can it be worth living? That is easy. It is worth living because, it doesn’t matter if the things we strive for are undone in the end, what matters, is the simple, honest and frequent pleasures that can be enjoyed by simply living.
Life is about the tiny, momentary occasions of happiness that we can steal away while we push our boulders up the hill. The feeling of sun hitting your skin on a warm summer day. The sound of a child’s uncontrolled laughter. The soft, lingering caress of an intimate love. These are all such beautiful things that do not derive value from the immortality of them, but from the living and experience of them, and that is the true point of Camus’ message. Life may be meaningless in that it all amounts to nothing in the end but it is unquestionably meaningful to each one of us through the very process of living it.
By the very fact that we can imagine an end to all these things that we love so much in life, therein begins our appreciation of them. By knowing they could be gone we must come to be more aware of those subtle joys and pleasures that are given to us each day, despite our struggles and the absurdity of it all. We can still come to experience so deeply and live so fully, without requiring a meaning to go along with any of it.
Summary
I can not even begin to say that I have done the philosophies or ideas covered in this two part series the justice they deserve. My intent is not to present a comprehensive, scholarly essay, but to stir the passions inside you to find them and devour them yourselves. To show you that there is living to be done in these words and ideas. That the deep thoughts are merely a starting point to applying these things to your life, and to the way you think about living, so that you may be changed, positively, in a way that helps you create and shape your own philosophies about the good life. That’s it. Small task, right? Maybe not, but I know it’s worth the struggle.
All too often in the world of personal development we get lost in the shiny, new solutions to the oldest problems. We always want the quick fix or the simple hack that will piece our lives together. We want the instant gratification that we are moving forward. While some of these new solutions certainly have a place in our lives, it is often best to retreat into the resolute strength and undeniable hard work of those old, reliable answers to life’s most difficult situations.
People don’t often realize it, but personal development has existed for thousands of years. Before it was a multi-billion dollar industry full of mental hacks and modern-day motivational gurus, personal development was just called philosophy. Yup. Philosophy. Ok. Not all of philosophy is personal development. There is a lot of stuffy, academic shit, rightfully collecting dust on the shelves, just waiting for pedantic assholes to reference when they want to appear smarter than someone else. That philosophy isn’t that important to me. Maybe because I am not smart enough to understand it or maybe because it was never meant to be understood. Whatever the case, even without the purely academic philosophy, there is an over abundance and personal, actionable and important philosophy that we can crack open and apply to our lives in order to live happier, healthier and fuller existence. That is the stuff that can make for some powerful personal development fodder and that is the stuff I want to explore.
With that in mind, I am going to take the opportunity to introduce a few philosophers, in a two-part post series. This first part will cover some of the ancient philosophers who had a lot to say about personal development. In part two I will introduce some modern philosophers who put a whole new spin on personal development. My hope is that you find a spark of interest in these teachings and ideas and that you take the initiative to explore and apply these philosophies in your own life. As I have always said, all this personal growth stuff only works through diligent introspection and application- through finding what works for you and applying it with a steadfast resolve. There are no short cuts for that, but the more you know, the easier it will be to find what will work for you.
So, let’s explore a few figures in the early philosophical world and translate what they have to offer into something useful on our personal development path.
Diogenes the Cynic (c. 404-323 B.C.E)
Of what use is a philosopher who doesn’t hurt anybody’s feelings? – Diogenes
The Cynic philosopher, Diogenes of Sinope, was the performance artist and scandal maker of the ancient Greek philosophical world. He would sleep nude in a barrel in the middle of Athens, act like an untrained dog- pissing on peoples legs and eating garbage, masturbate in public. The man had a sharp and wild sense of humor that he sprinkled liberally within his philosophy. He was like the stand-up comic of the ancient Greek world. His stage was the sprawling Athenian market places, where he would mock market goers, rich or poor, with his piercing wit and wisdom, in an attempt to expose the folly of how they lived. He lived a life that was constantly questioning the status quo and walked boldly in his own direction, no matter what others thought of him. His entire life was a walking reflection of his philosophies.
The main lesson to be learned about personal development from Diogenes is that; our path of personal development requires questioning everything of the status quo and living a life free from the constraints of what others might have imposed upon us and try to force us to adhere to.
This questioning requires courage, strength and conviction and you need these things when honestly and seriously pursuing a path of personal development.
People are going to ask you why the hell you are doing some of the things you are doing on your personal development journey. They are going to try to get you to stop doing some things that serve you and continuing doing things that don’t serve you. Stop eating healthy and continuing to eat like shit. Stop working out and continuing to sit on the couch and watch Netflix. Stop pursuing sobriety and continuing to go out and get drunk. You get the point. The status quo is always going to get in your way when you try changing something as epic as the entire trajectory of your life. That shit makes everyone uncomfortable, because nobody wants to be faced with the mediocrity of their own life when they are not willing to change. They don’t want to see you change, because if you do, then they have to question why they can’t. So be ready to endure that onslaught of public disdain and mockery. Accept it. Embrace it. Laugh about it. I don’t recommend you masterbate in public, but if you can endure the ridicule of living an exceptional and meaningful life half as well as Diogenes, you will be just fine.
Epicurus (341-271 B.C.E)
Not what we have but what we enjoy, constitutes our abundance. – Epicurus
The philosophy of Epicureanism, named after the philosopher Epicurus, is perhaps one of the most maligned and miscategorized philosophies of the ancient Greeks. Epicureanism today is seen as a sort of celebration of the good life. Fancy food. Expensive style. Pampered opulence. Basically, rich people’s shit. Nothing can be further from the truth of what Epicurus taught.
Epicurus taught a message of deliberate joy derived from the experience of life’s most simple and accessible pleasures.
A small, wholesome meal with a few close friends. A quiet conversation with a trusted confidant. The subtle warmth of a fire on a cold, rainy day. These things seem minuscule and meaningless to our materialistic and socially maladjusted world, but when we step back and evaluate what we really value in life, why we are truly on this path of personal development, I think that we will find that we are looking hard for things that may be right under our noses. We do not have to strive so hard for the material things that seem just out of reach of our ever growing grasp. A raise. A promotion. A new possession. A new friend on Facebook. Our pursuit of these things usually takes us away from the things we really want, the things that we always had but never stopped to appreciate. It is these simple things that draw us back to lasting satisfaction in a world that is full of fleeting promises of what pleasures will be derived from the next big thing. This is the lesson of Epicurus. To truly enjoy whatever small comforts we have and immerse ourselves fully in them and be grateful that they exist.
Epictetus (55-135 B.C.E)
There is only one way to happiness and that is to cease worrying about things which are beyond the power of our will. – Epictetus
Epictetus is one of my favorite philosophers. His story from brutally abused slave to respected philosophical mind is a compelling one. He was a major figure in the school of Stoicism. Most people think of Stoicism as a philosophical school about repressing emotion and carrying a general pessimism and resignation about life. That is far from the truth. Stocisim is perhaps one of the best philosophies geared towards personal growth and one that is making a comeback in modern times. It emphasizes emotional responsibility and personal self-control and offers so many actionable ways to deal with difficult emotional situations; ways that grant a large amount of emotional freedom in nearly any circumstance, when applied and exercised properly.
One of the main points that Epictetus, and Stoicism in general, brings to the table is the idea of internalizing your goals and letting go of all things that are beyond our control, which is basically everything that exists externally to us.
What does this mean? All too often we set goals that are out of our control or we get lost in things that are out of our control and we let them do emotional damage to us. Let’s say I am playing in a tennis match. My goal may be to win that match. The problem is, that no matter how much I practice, or how good I am, there is the potential to lose because things outside of my control can influence the result. My opponent may simply be better than me. Or I may get injured. Or any number of things may happen. As a result, my goal of wanting to win is thwarted, not by my own efforts, but by something external to myself so I am disappointed in the result and I am upset at my lack of achievement. All of this could have been avoided if I had focused solely on those things I could control and tied my emotions to those results instead.
We should set goals that cannot be affected externally by things outside of our control. I am playing in a tennis match? My goal should be to play my very best. Nothing can impact that goal except for my internal motivation and my personal effort, which are totally and completely under my control. This should be how we approach every goal in life. Evaluate how to internalize our goals and how to recognize the things that are under our control and disregard all the other things as things that just happen. They cannot affect us if we do not let them, nor can they change the emotional state of our being because that is entirely up to us.
Conclusion
Obviously, the philosophers I have featured here have offered so much more in the way of actionable personal development philosophies. Too much for me to ever cover in a blog post. There are also many, many other philosophers who have presented so many brilliant ideas on how to live a good life. I did not want to overwhelm, so I stuck to a few that have really affected me.
I hope that this brief introduction gives you a starting point for exploring these philosophers, and many others, yourself and not just reading, but applying the philosophies and lessons they offer. I also hope that you begin to see that, all the things we are trying to work out today – the right ways to live, the ways to happiness, the ways to live a good life – these are all questions that have floated around for a long time and the reason that so many different philosophies about personal development exist is because there is not one answer for everyone. You find your answer by exploring as much as you can of what is already out there and then getting off your ass and putting it into practice and shaping your own personal development philosophy. That is how this all works. So go find what works for you.
P.S. For a really amazing podcast that explores the lives and philosophies of these philosophers, and so many more, I highly suggest you check out the podcast Philosophize This! by Stephen West. His presentation of these great philosophers is absolutely brilliant! I also want to suggest an incredible book that explores philosophy in the way I am suggesting here. It is called, Philosophy for Life and Other Dangerous Situations by Jules Evans.
What can we really know about romantic love? It is like a whirlwind sometimes; defying reason and physics, sweeping us up in its storm and placing us somewhere far from where we began. It comes with such ferocity and intensity, and we are so caught up in it, that we rarely have the opportunity to investigate it before it’s gone.
We usually only stop to consider the love that we are caught up in when it has lost its life and lies windless and dull, with a mess all around us. And by then it is too late. Love’s reasons to have begun are no longer there and you are left only with the reasons it thinks that it should stay. Because you have put in the time. Because you are afraid to be alone. Because it’s what you are used to.
But if we had the chance to step back and observe love in nature; peek in on it from infancy to maturity, from middle age to death, I think that we would find that loving someone else is mostly a reflective and self-affirming thing. What we come to love is what we find of ourselves in another and the joy at what we see reflected back to us – a validation that we have a same out there somewhere. As Scottish poet Alexander Smith said;
“Love is but the discovery of ourselves in others, and the delight in the recognition.”
But where there is love there is also the potential for loss. Of losing ourselves in the whirlwind and of losing the whirlwind of ourselves. So there are lessons to be learned from loving and losing if we know where to look.
On Loving
We often hear the pithy words that you can not love another until you love yourself, but I disagree. Loving yourself is not a necessary component of love. Love must start alone, that much is true, but it begins with self-awareness. Love – true, lasting love – is only possible as you begin to know yourself, question yourself and search for yourself. Love is a quest to find your mind in the body of another, so that you may be sure of the validity of your vision of the world. We love deeply so that we can connect enough with someone else – to trust them enough – that we can come to have reliable confirmation that someone, anyone, can see with our eyes and feel through our hearts and that we are not alone in how we see this world.
We come to love because we want to be confirmed. We want to find ourselves – the reflection of us that is not us – so that we can be sure we are a real thing in a real world. Slipping into love is our way to bring ourselves out of ourselves. To find validation in the way we see the universe because it is a shared vision with another person. It is momentary authentication of a world in which we realize that we are all subject to our own experiences and we have no means to truly connect with the depth that we so desire.
We love ourselves all the more when we come to love another. And in “delighting in the recognition” of another distant soul that shares our spaces, we come to form a whole. Like the Roman myth of Zeus hurling lightning bolts to split us from our other half, we feel complete when we meet another that may be the fulfillment of us. Because the heart seems like a thing that has been parted, that it is missing something that it lost. Even if you have never loved at all, the want of another half pushes you to look for it. A thing that can be found. So you go off to find the one that shares your mind.
But you realize quickly that love is not merely a finding thing. It is a learned thing. Philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche compared the learning of love to learning how to appreciate music:
“One must learn to love.— This is what happens to us in music: first one has to learn to hear a figure and melody at all, to detect and distinguish it, to isolate it and delimit it as a separate life; then it requires some exertion and good will to tolerate it in spite of its strangeness, to be patient with its appearance and expression, and kindhearted about its oddity:—finally there comes a moment when we are used to it, when we wait for it, when we sense that we should miss it if it were missing: and now it continues to compel and enchant us relentlessly until we have become its humble and enraptured lovers who desire nothing better from the world than it and only it.— But that is what happens to us not only in music: that is how we have learned to love all things that we now love. In the end we are always rewarded for our good will, our patience, fairmindedness, and gentleness with what is strange; gradually, it sheds its veil and turns out to be a new and indescribable beauty:—that is its thanks for our hospitality. Even those who love themselves will have learned it in this way: for there is no other way. Love, too, has to be learned.”
Learning how to love comes from awareness; of yourself and the other. It is an approach of appreciation in the familiar strangeness that we find in the person we come to love and dedicating our time and energy to understanding that strange melody of difference because we see the impression of our own oddity and we find the rhythm of our own hearts in the song of another. And then you see the beauty that can be produced when you truly learn to love.
It is a process that comes with failures and successes. Every love we have is another opportunity to further appreciate the nuance of what loving means for us and how we can better approach, understand and be gentle with it. Every love is a different melody and if we can learn to be patient and attentive and inquisitive we can find the harmony that best fits the song we now sing.
But even after learning how, love is walking the thin rope bridging the gap between isolation and intimacy. That trembling trip where we are so precariously balanced; our teetering, clumsy steps inching us closer towards the other side, but threatening a tumble to the abyss of heartache should we fail to step too quickly or too widely or too broadly. And we are clumsy animals in love, so it is often that we fall.
On Losing
The sad reality is, although we ache to find someone who understands us completely, who occupies the same space in the world and who sees with the same eyes that we do, we can never truly find the understanding that we so desire. Even the closest and deepest of loves is left separated behind a thin fog of the individuality of our experiences, emotions, and thoughts. We can never truly know the other person with a completeness that we ache for.
It is the origin of nearly every misunderstanding in a relationship that we should be expected to know the thoughts and desires of another in such detail and strength that we can know what the other will think before they do; know what they will want before they do. We are expected to read minds because being in love makes it feel like you are sharing one, but that expectation is a killing thing in love.
We want to maintain the facade of total understanding of another person, so we make accommodations in order for it to fit our vision. We change ourselves a little to make the love last. We find the reflection of ourselves in the other person fading, but still, we try to hang on and make it look the same because we swore we saw it once and we know the other person understands us to completion. We tell ourselves that without them we might just be alone in our understanding of this big, black universe and the thought of not having someone that can corroborate our story is too much to bear.
And because of that, our hearts often break. The expectation of understanding dissolves and arguments ensue or we no longer appreciate the strange melody that the other person produced because the oddness is now so unlike our own, so we go off to search for another that might be closer to our own. No matter how it breaks, it always breaks, because we put too much expectation on the understanding of another.
But that breaking of a heart is a pain worth having because hearts are good at being broken. They are fragile things that shatter all the time, and nature gives us the adhesive to put it all back together again – time.
You will slowly forget to remember that they are gone. The hole that they left will eventually grow over; with weeds at first. Harsh things that demand to be pulled, but if you tend to your heart by using the loss to know yourself in a deeper way you can plant something there that would never have had the chance to grow before, because it’s a different sort of soil now.
But you ask, how do I love with a heart that’s broken? And I tell you to look at the scattered remnants of your heart and you find the piece that loves. You reclaim it from the broken pieces of everything else of your life that losing love makes and you push it back inside your chest. The rest of your life will reconstruct around that still, small piece that loves.
Because something broken begs for, not just repair, but reconstruction to be better. We can remodel our hearts in any way we like, using anything we have on hand. Friends. Family. Nature. Meditation. Exercise. Travel. Hobbies. There are a million ways to build a better heart that will be better at loving the next time it comes around. And it starts again with getting to know yourself, who you are now that you have loved and lost, and who you want to be after.
The truth is, loving or losing, all of it is mere moments. The first nervous ones of exploration and expectation. The languid, liquid moments that seem to stretch out like a river where you are learning about the other; their hopes and dreams and visions that you share. The roller-coaster-heart-thumps of first kisses and the tremble of fingers on skin. The blinding moments of distress and pain and sadness and hurt. The ache of absence and the confusion of argument. They are all just tiny moments that eventually add up to a thing we chase again and again.
Because when you expose yourself to love – opening to the explosion of your soul at the recognition of another or the potential pain and eventual death by a million tiny cuts – you risk a disaster that is worth the price. You choose to fly too close to the sun, enjoying a view and a wind and a freedom to find yourself that few people ever get to touch, knowing that it could melt you down into a tumble to earth and you could lose it all in a moment.
But you always remember; losing in love does not make you unlovable or unloved. You are never unlovable or unloved because all it takes to be loved is for someone to recognize the part inside you that reflects the part inside them. A recognition of the common things that you share and the unique melody of your music together. There are so many of those reflections possible in this world if we only polish the mirrors of our minds and hearts by living the lives that we want for ourselves and learning about what it takes to appreciate the love that we find.
Gather around kids, I have a tale to tell; about the day that philosophy decided to rebel…
We have a problem. A problem of the mind. A problem of having it and rarely using it. A problem of neglecting it and forgetting it. A problem of losing it and destroying it. A problem of gluttonous filling of it with inane, insignificant, insoluble shit. A problem of ignorance, intolerance and outright viciousness towards conflicting ideas and beliefs. A problem that is destroying our world. A problem that can not continue if we hope to survive. It is to those problems that I raise a call to philosophical rebellion.
You see, we need a way out. A way to find the truth of our lives. A way to disagree with respect. A way to find out the things that matter to us and defend them with our mental might, but not come to defend them at the cost of others. We need a way to think and grow that lasts a lifetime and changes the very core of our being. A way that sets to flame the rotting, unreasoned hovels of ignorance, hatred and self deception and builds the monuments of understanding, acceptance and wisdom. That way is to return to the roots of reason. The pursuit of philosophy.
I am not suggesting a system. A catch all methodology to find your joy in life. I am weary of people who claim to have a system to manage and direct the intentions of the entirety of a people. There is simply too much variation, to much diversity and extremity of malady for everyone to be cured by any one system. We suffer too personally and our diseases are too specific to be treated by the generic.
That is why we must diagnose ourselves through critical, honest and constant evaluation. We must be our own doctors and find our own specific prescriptions in the words of philosophy, because the seeds of philosophy planted today are the forests of reason, skepticism, understanding and wisdom, grown tomorrow. And we must remember that, where we rest our minds is the soil from which those forests will spring. Just as you can not hope to grow a bounty from ruined dirt and rancid seeds, so you can not expect to live a life of joy and happiness by planting the seeds of ignorance, insensitivity and naiviety.
And it is those rotting seeds of ignorance and dogmatic belief that causes us to suffer so much more than the psychological maladies and neurological malfunctions that can be cured by science and medicine. We see everyday the growing insanity of man in spite of the growing body of science that promises to cure the struggles of the mind. Because we are more than that. We are a symbiosis of heart and mind and the afflictions of the mind, the ones that paralysis us on sleepless nights and send heart palpitating anxieties through our bodies, often begin in the heart – as quiet, creeping doubts and sadnesses, secreted away fears and hurts, that slowly weave their way into our minds and take root as psychological deformities that fester in our minds.
I recognize that there are some problems of the mind that run so much deeper than philosophy can dig. There are so many serious conditions that require the serious assistance of a professional. There is no substitute for that, but there are more general problems, the ones that contaminate the day to day experience of so many people, that could be cured by approaching philosophy in the right way.
Philosophy is not all heavy intellectual lifting and hours pondering shadowy truths in the dark abyss of a smoky cafe. Philosophy started as two parts personal development and one part intellectual curiosity. It went out into the world and experimented, challenged, rebelled, debated and evolved. The greatest philosophers lived their ideals; they didn’t just talk about them, and in the process they found the reason in their lives. The found strengths they never had and powers they never expected.
Philosophical thinking is like taking up an exercising program to get fit. Everyone knows that at least a little physical activity everyday is good for you. Now up to that point, you get to take your level of physical involvement in an exercise program as far as you want. You can do the bare minimum for strength and maintenance of a physique you already have. You can take it further and work more intensely in order to get to a physique you will be comfortable with, or you can take it to the extreme, training for a marathon or triathlon, and seek to join the upper echelon of athletic accomplishment. Philosophy is the same in regards to levels of effort, but the returns are more noticeable and dramatic at any effort level.
Even the bare amount of daily, deliberate, philosophical inquiry is enough to improve your mental physique. It will make your mind more supple, accepting and open to the world. You can, of course, chose to take your philosophical thinking to the next level, but you do not need to work so intensely, or be an elite philosophical mind, to reap the benefits of philosophical inquiry, reflection and study as it is brought into your life.
And yes, sometimes you have to set it all down, walk away for a while, take a mental rest day and go live your live, because no ideas, no philosophies, no understandings matter if they are not rooted in the world and in the expression of yourself. Therein lies the critical importance of philosophy. We must come to rejoice in the distraction and occasionally put down our intellectual ponderings in favor of the obvious and expansive joys of merely living.
The key in returning philosophy to its personal glory is to remove the obfuscation of it. The greatest hurdle is in the language, in the hiding of key points behind flowery beds of prose. Now I am not saying that we can distill great philosophical treatise of brilliant minds to a few bullet points and then go our merry way thinking that we understand the entirety of a philosopher’s work. I am saying that we don’t need to understand the entirety of a work in order to get value out of it. We can pull out some aphorisms, give them context and application in our lives and use them, see if they work, take them out for a test drive, because that is where philosophy is supposed to be living – outside in the real world.
We must return to the vision of Socrates to steal away philosophy from the academics who think we can not work it. We are in fact the only ones who can work it, because it was always meant for us. It was meant to improve our lives, to direct our motivations, to get us thinking about the world; our world, the world that we build and move through. The world that we shape through our beliefs and intentions and actions.
And we must come to teach a way to navigate our world, not by merely giving directions to get to a destination, but providing the tools to find your own way. We must teach the art of personal development cartography through philosophy so that people can develop their own maps to get where they need to go. Shared maps do no good. We are all starting in difference places and we are all moving along different routes and the landmarks of direction for one person can not be seen by another. While we may be headed towards the same destination, we must each find our own way of getting there, and that is what philosophy provides.
By placing in our minds a diversity of knowledge, experience and influence, we are able to ensure the right sort of thoughts will surface when we are least paying attention; those of wisdom and growth. You do not have to read philosophy as prescriptive or dogmatic. You don’t have to take all of it or get none of it. But the more you digest the more you will find what resonates with you and your mind will start to take on a new shape – fitness that it never had before and you will be able to think farther and stronger than you ever imagined possible. You will develop that vitality of mind that comes from questioning our beliefs, investigating their validity and going to search for new ones when they fail us.
So we must rebel. We must rebel against the destructive distractions of the day and reassert ourselves to the cause of living, thinking, breathing and doing. The cause of philosophy. We must take up mental arms against the constant war that is being waged for our attention and our belief and our ideals and we must be strong enough to fight back, opposing those forces that threaten to bring us down to their level by applying our reason. We must come together and fight the will to ignorance with the will to wisdom. There is nothing left for us to lose and everything for us to gain.
Today we start the philosophy rebellion and tomorrow we reshape the world.
How often have you paged through the whole of your life and considered the difference a few smalls changes could have made; a few small twists of fate and circumstance? What would your life be like if your luck had just been different? If the fates had seen fit to place you gently in to a life of abundance and health and you had not the opportunity to suffer the great pains and injuries that plagued your existence? If you had not the mountains of struggle in your rear view mirror would you be further along on your path? Would you be better and happier and more whole than you are today? What then would you have to say about your life?
If you were honest with yourself, I think you would say, “That is not my life. It is the life of someone other than me because what I am today was only made possible by all of my experiences. By the scars and the bruises and the setbacks as much as the triumphs. I am all of my life and every piece of it has made me who I am today.”
And you would be right. You can not be the you that you are today without the pain and loss and misery you felt but yesterday. You can not embrace a single, solitary joy, pulling it to your chest and loving it with all your heart, without equally embracing all the pain that brought it to you. Because it all comes together. It is all part of one whole thing that is all required in order to get any of it.
Amor Fati – The Love of Fate
Friedrich Nietzsche, an influential philosopher and fledgling psychologist of the late 19th century, gave a name and a philosophical theory to this radical acceptance of all the fateful things that life brings to all people. Amor Fati. The love of fate. Nietzsche’s ideas on this concept seem to run parallel to the ancient Greek Stoic philosophers, who also emphasized the importance of focusing your attention for change on those things to which you had firmly under your control – namely your reactions and emotional responses to things – and learning to accept those things you do not; which is everything external to yourself.
Amor fati is the idea that, in order to truly attain a consistent and enduring level of happiness in life we must become comfortable with all the maladies and miseries as much as with the fortunes and joys. We must find as deep a love for the misfortunes that we face as for the fortunes that we seek because they are all a necessary part of the only thing we have; Life.
Nietzsche suffered heavily during the later stages of his life. Stricken by crippling illness and debilitating diseases that left him bedridden, wasting away and eventually overcome by insanity and it is to this personal depreciation that he reached out towards the idea of loving your fate and living fully, despite the insistence of time and life that we are to casually devolve into a wasted shell of what we once were. There is no denying the grand fate of man and in its acceptance comes a freedom to perpetually create, without the struggle against your fate.
Like a tree planted in malnourished soil, you do not begrudge your poor luck at lacking the things you need to thrive. You find a different way to grow or you die trying. You do not curse the seasons of your falling leaves, but embrace the necessary losses required for your future sprouting, because life demands of you to accept the occasional pains and losses of prosperity. It demands that you accept the difficulties of living so that you can enjoy the accomplishment of life. It demands that you learn to accept those things to which you have no control and then you find a way to grow despite them.
You will never be handed ideal conditions in which to grow in life. You will always be faced with the myriad of killing things that threaten to destroy you, but the true and lasting strength of your story comes from your endurance. It comes from the scrapes and cuts and breaks of living. It comes from thriving despite your fate.
There is so much growth that happens underneath what we can see. The spreading of roots that is ours alone to know. The stable things that nourish you and keep you whole and healthy, those are the things that we must protect in order to show the world the pretty things that we can blossom above ground.
So what do we do?
Let go of the time you spend raging against those things that you can not change, the things that have been willed by fate for you to endure. The things that make you stronger, heartier and more apt to weather the future storms of life. The time you waste focused on your bad luck is time better spent getting to the work of starting again.
There is no complaint so loud that it would ever change your luck, and there is no action so quiet that it would ever keep you still. The purpose of complaining is to convince the world that we have been wronged. We have been accosted by the whims of providence and as such we have an excuse to prevent us from accomplishing what we sent out to accomplish. I do not deny the influence of fate in changing the direction of our lives, but you either accept that and move on in a new direction or you drift along rudderless and curse the wind for not taking you to where you wanted to go.
Nietzsche said it best when he said:
“My formula for human greatness is amor fati: that one wants nothing to be different, not in the future, not in the past, not for all eternity. Not only to endure what is necessary, still less to conceal it — all idealism is falseness in the face of necessity — , but to love it…”
The Paradox of Fateful Ownership
Yes. There is a paradox to the idea of loving your fate and also choosing in every moment to create the life you want. But there doesn’t have to be.
The point of loving your fate is not in accepting all things that come to you simply as they are and sitting on the sidelines of your life as though you had nothing to contribute to the working of fate. The point is to come to accept that, even the best-laid plans, the deepest felt loves, the hardest worked fields and the strongest felt desires can all be scorched to the ground by the randomly shifting fires of fate. You accept this, but you never let it deter you from starting again; building atop the smoldering ruins, a firmer foundation and a higher ideal.
We should always strive to create more and better, within the working of our fate, but never come to be consumed by the result. Like a great painter, if we are not satisfied with the product we have created we merely begin again, delighting not in the finished work but fully in the process of creation – in the eternal beginning again and again – with the lesson learned and the vision clearer. We should never be burdened by the imposition of judging the result. Others will judge it for us, to that we can be sure, but all that truly matters is if it fulfilled the promises we made to ourselves.
Embracing the Pain
There have been many times in raising my son that he has come across some pain, physical or mental, and my fatherly advice to him has been, “embrace the pain.” Now, I do not ask this of him as a manly thing, or as an emotionally dulling thing, but as a vigorously human thing. A critical skill to be learned in order to be prepared for the eventual and inevitable pains that life has to bring.
And of course there are times when I embrace the pain in him for the both of us – when I hold him and comfort him and wipe the tears from his eyes as if they fell from my own – but there is so much value in learning to embrace the pain of life – value that he will see when he is faced with personal pain that I can no longer embrace for him, no matter how much I want to.
And when he is grown, and I stand beside him and I see the strength that he is willed into his mind and body and heart and soul and he perseveres despite the odds placed against him or the circumstances to which he is thrown, I will know that he has learned to “embrace the pain” to which he was given and has found the fortitude to start again despite it all.
So look at your life, knowing what you now know, and ask yourself, “Is it time to embrace the pain and move forward? Is it time to accept the circumstances of it all to such a degree that I can start again to live? Is it time to accept your fate to such a degree that you can begin the real, honest work of living?” The answer is; Yes, it is time. Now is the best time. Now is the only time. Now is when you endure the fates, but you begin to create your life. Now is when you stop complaining about what you were handed and you start creating what you think you deserve. Now is when you develop the endurance to run the long distance and to suffer the long pains.
Because now is all you have, and we are fragile, fleeting creatures, tempered to strength only by the pains that we endure, the fates that we accept. There is no hardening of the metal of our minds without the beating of the hammer on our emotions. We are born fragile, but it is through the struggles that we must face that we are forged into greatness and it is only through this process that we can come to endure that which life asks of us; to accept, to create and to live fully within.
Living is a giving thing. The more we pour ourselves into the world the more we get from the experience of life. A quiet satisfaction and contentment springs forth from our investment in the world. While it is the source of unbridled happiness and pleasure to be a well and not a drain, the opposite is also true. When we shrink away from giving, when we live in the shadows of fear, taking from the world and hiding away all that we have to offer, we find ourselves slipping towards regret.
And regret is a slow rolling storm that gains momentum as it moves. It starts as shower and ends as a tempest, battering us against the waves of life and shadowing the future of our movements. And when regret finally breaks us we look back at our shattered life and we say, “How can there be so many broken pieces of me from things I never tried? Why should I shatter so completely from simply never giving everything of myself?”
I don’t think anyone wants to dwell among the fragments of a half lived life. And that is why we must give. But what should we give in order to die without regret?
Only these four things, which are everything to life.
Your heart
You have to live free of the fear of getting hurt. You have to give forcefully, fully, frequently and freely of the unique heart that only you possess. You are the entrepreneur of a special kind of love. What you can create from your heart is an exclusive, desired and important product that there will always be a demand for. The world needs everyone’s sort of love; to mix them all together to make that special shade of fellowship that only the combining of everyone’s heart can produce.
But it is not enough that you should give your heart only to those people who are easy to give it to. You must habitually give your heart to everyone and everything. Remove the choosing of compassion and love and settle into the ritual and routine of it.
You must never close your heart; no matter what pain or misery that you endure by leaving it open. Because when you shutter the windows of your heart you are not only shutting out the potential for pain, you are also shutting out the potential for connection; for light and beauty and joy and devotion and all the other graceful things that can come dancing in out of the dark, looking for a bright place to stay.
And if you want to know if you will get hurt again; you will. Because sometimes you will give your heart to people who do not see the value in it. People who are only facile collectors of such things as love and loyalty and trust and respect and not honest connoisseurs of them. They put these things on shelves and swear they know the value, but they never experience the flavors and complexities and vintages in earnest.
But even with all that, you never stop looking and loving and giving and being a god damn invincible, personal crusader for everything that your heart desires, because you get what you give and giving your heart with a brave and relentless consistency will get you the world.
Your body
All the blood, sweat and tears that you have inside you should be laid down often at your feet as witness to the passion and intensity of your life. The world should be able to track you through the trail of your blood, sweat and tears and you should die knowing that you put out all the humors that were inside of you and there was nothing left of your body that you had left to give.
Bleed because you have been wounded. You have stepped into battle often enough that you know what it is like to spill blood unto the ground. Yours and your enemies. Sweat because you have worked hard. You have pushed yourself to the limits and have tasted the salty, satisfying substance of exertion. Cry, because sometimes it hurts so much that the only way to get through it all is to let your tears trace down your cheeks in a waterfall of release.
Do not be ashamed of your body. Be unafraid to give it to the world, with all it’s million flaws. All of it is yours; if you love it, leave it and if you hate it, change it. You carry it with you for the rest of your days so, above all things, take care to nourish it. It is the only one you get and it will carry you only as far as you prepare it to.
And when you give it to the world, know that you are giving the world the cover of your book. You may not want them to judge you by it but they will, and you can use that to your advantage or complain about it until you die.
Your mind
Give the world your big ideas – your dreams and hopes and wishes for life – the ones sitting on the shelf collecting dust. The ones you are too afraid to give because you don’t want them to be misunderstood or mishandled. You need to give the world the mental best that you have to offer. Remove the fear of what they will do with those big, beautiful things living in your head and put them out there. Stop punishing all the amazing things that live inside your mind with distractions and doubt and let them live and flourish like flowers in a well tended garden.
Not everyone will understand the things you have in your mind, but the right people will. The ones that share a motivation towards the things that you are so inclined. Those people will gravitate towards you like moths to a flame and they will be a constant, swirling reminder of just how many people want the kind of light that only you can produce.
You should resolve to die empty of the regrets that slowly creep into the mind of a life half-lived. All the things you should have said and should have done and should have been, those things want to be free of your mind and exploded into the world so they can work their magic. Nothing want’s to live the shadowed life of a regret so let them free. Nurture and tend to your dreams but do not hold them so tightly that they suffocate. Our dreams are never ours alone and once we give them to the world we must be confident that we raised them right and they can survive without us.
Your soul
It is not enough that you should give the world your big ideas, as though they were the best you had to offer. You need to give the world a completed aspect of yourself. Your everything. The carefully tied together expression of your heart, your mind, your blood and your body. That is your soul. The things that put together makes you, you. The world needs that, because you are the only you there is and ever will be in this world. The carefully constructed probability of you will never exist again and this is the only moment you have to give that to the world.
So, crawl to your death bed knowing that there was not a single part of you that did not come into contact with the world. You gave your soul and all the constituent parts of it that make it yours. You gave this one opportunity for life everything you had and, for better or for worse, what the world saw of you was truly you. Not some half assed interpretation of what you think the world wanted of you, but a full-blown, fucking declaration of what you think the world should want from everyone; their everything.
That’s it. That is the only magic we have. But it is powerful and it is enough. Enough to last a lifetime. You get to choose if you want to save it up and huddle under the blankets, piling up regrets until it all gets taken away. Or, you make the choice to go out there into the world everyday and give every single, fucking, bit of your heart, your body, your mind and your soul. Because when the magics done, it’s done, and whether you used it – whether you gave it everything you had – only makes a difference to your story and what people tell of it when you are gone.
