Philosophies of Life

I believe that the purpose of life is to figure out what the purpose of life is; I think people can only really answer the big questions themselves, or else the answers won't mean much to them. However, I also think it's perfectly natural for every person to think their answer is the One True Answer, and as long as they don't act all surprised that others don't agree, or try to force those others to agree, their feeling that those others are fools for not agreeing is perfectly reasonable. Each of us is the center of a universe built for one; there's nothing wrong with that. However, it is often fun for us to look beyond and see what others think, disregarding their opinion if it does not suit us, and assimilating it as our own if it does. To that end, here are my personal answers, the conclusions to which I have come in the course of my life.

I believe that the universe we live in has a purpose; it may have been created by an intelligence or randomly generated from the ocean of possibility, but either way its existence here and now accomplishes something. That purpose is to create Ideas; the cosmos is a factory for thoughts, concepts, perspectives and potential truths, and we human beings are the workstations on the assembly line. Our purpose is to think, and thereby generate ideas; for that reason, the extent to which a person is fulfilling their purpose in existence is determined by the quantity, quality, and uniqueness of their thoughts. Your whims, your feelings, your fantasies, your ideals - all of these are why you are alive, they are what you accomplish by living, they are what the universe needs from you. You should treasure them, cultivate them, record them, perfect them, and share them with others, expecting of course that others will not always be appreciative; by refining and transforming your ideas over the course of a lifetime, you contribute to the infinite body of human knowledge and thought, whose generation I consider the only reason why Reality ever needed to exist.

While my concept of ethics is relative and situational, and I try to beware of making absolutist statements about what people should and shouldn't do since the answers are seldom easy enough to put into a pithy statement, I do think a few moral precepts follow from my belief, and that they would be good ones to live by. Since a person's ideas are the whole reason they exist, others should respect those ideas and not try to limit his or her ability to express them. A person's ideas are synonymous with that person's value, and should themselves be valued; it's fine to believe an idea has no usefulness in practical terms, but to say someone has no right to even think such a thing is basically the same as saying that person has no right to exist - their thoughts are their existence, their beliefs and personality being all that truly exists of them. The flesh and the world are transient; we know they inevitably succumb to death and destruction in time. But the spark of personality, the "soul" if you will, remains an unknown quantity whose existence cannot be disproven, and whose ultimate fate if it does exist is unknown; for that reason, we should assume it exists, as we will cause less harm by pretending it is real than we would if we failed to acknowledge it when it really was.

Ultimately, the ability of the written word to express what we mean is limited; our thoughts do not always fit neatly into words, as the existence of multiple human languages for a single human race can attest. We do the best we can to communicate, but we should always keep in mind that the words tell only part of the story, and should not judge others too harshly based on what they say. Nor should we be too hard on them for the sake of what they do; reality forces many people to behave in a less than ideal fashion, so a sense of proportion and situational awareness will serve better than any dogmatic code in determining how to judge a person's actions.

This is of course only the beginnings of a belief system; as my life continues, I will constantly revise and improve these ideals. For now, I do not ask that anyone do anything other than consider my words. But I think it is a realistic possibility that these ideals will eventually evolve into a more sophisticated understanding of how and why the game of life should be played than any previous culture has achieved. It's only natural that today's Internet age is capable of producing a synthesis of all human thought never before seen; even when I am not feeling so arrogant as to believe I will personally achieve that ultimate ethos, I seldom fail to believe that I will at least be a major contributor toward its eventual realization.