About a decade ago, I had a blog where I wrote articles that fell under the self-help genre. I had no intention of writing a self-help blog but that’s what it ended up becoming. I had posts on topics such as:

• Why voluntarily accepting suffering is a key character trait for success and happiness in life
• The golden rule in life is to always choose the hardest thing you can do
• Why selfishness is natural and not a problem and why smart selfishness can help us expand our ego to include our loved ones, our neighbors and eventually all of humanity in it
• How we could save the world by doing three things:
  1. Become a vegetarian (not a vegan)
  2. Become a minimalist (anti-consumerist)
  3. And spread this message
• A document called The Foolish Manifesto
• A series on Keys of Life
• A series on what values to hold
• Etc. etc. etc.

If you could read that blog now, you’d think that I was preaching a lot and telling people how they should live. But that was never my intention, especially because I would struggle to follow my own advice most of the time. Writing the blog was a way to tell myself how I should live and perhaps find some motivation to do the things that I ‘knew’ were the right things to do.

Of course, that’s not how it came across. I never had a big audience so I’m not talking about how real people took it. I’m talking about how it came across to me after a few years. The word was hypocrite. I was writing all these posts about how to live, that sounded like preaching, while I wasn’t following any of my own advice. I was even changing my mind about many of the things I had written about. Like I had this whole idea about conscious spiritual evolution being the goal of humanity and I wrote many posts about that but then a few years later, I stopped believing in it.

I eventually deleted that blog and went through a phase of depression, recovered, and started this new blog, focusing on art and creativity. But now that I’m doing much better and wanting to write more frequently on the blog, I keep coming back to writing articles that sound self-help-ish. These ideas are always on my mind and I write to talk to myself and it comes across as if I’m telling people how they should live.

This is why I’m focusing on philosophy this time. I still want to explore the same ideas but not in the “this is what you should do” voice. I want to explore it in a “let’s see if this makes any sense” voice. And the primary focus will be on applying my ideas to my own life. First apply it, then record the results, then see if the idea holds up, then write about it. And the writing should say, this is what I think, this is why I think it, this is what happened when I applied it to my life.

A certain amount of preachiness is inevitable when dealing with such topics. The truth is that I would never dare tell people how they should live. I just want to share my findings and perhaps someone will find it helpful for their own journey. I don’t mean they’ll be helped only if they agree with my ideas, but simply by interacting with them. Even if they reject them or it helps them form new ideas or they amend the ideas and make them better, it doesn’t matter to me. Equally, if my ideas do help them, that’s fine too.

It’s not about whether I’m right or not. It’s not about whether I’ve solved life’s major issues or not. I’m not interested in “winning philosophy”. It’s about reading and writing and thinking and doing to improve my own understanding and live a richer experience and sharing my ideas with the world, without worrying about how many people get exposed to my ideas or how they react.

What this means is that philosophy is not my main hustle. In fact, hustle is not my main hustle. I’m not a job description. I’m a life liver. That’s my main hustle. I live life. That means I use philosophy to figure out what’s the best way to live and then try to apply it in my life and 90% of my life is about that and 10% or less is about sharing what I learn by doing this.

This is why I want to do philosophy: (first and foremost) to live a better life and share my ideas (without preaching), just in case they might help someone.