I found something I wrote in an old diary in the starting of 2017. At that time, I didn’t even consider myself a philosopher but it’s interesting to see how much of my philosophy was already there.

Philosophical Post from 2017

Life seems to be meaningless. You are born and you die. How you live in between, doesn’t really matter. If you think abut it in an objective way, your life doesn’t matter to the universe, or to life, or to planet earth, or even to humanity. Your life matters the most to you. Then the circle of influence becomes weaker as it grows. You matter a little to your family, a little less to your friends, very little to your acquaintances, and not at all to strangers. If you become famous, your life might matter to a large portion of humanity. If you become a famous scientist or revolutionary, you might even play a significant role in humanity’s journey. But that is the maximum limit of how much your life can mean.

For most of us, our choices in life, whether we smoked or not, whether we believed in god or not, whether we were good fathers or not, whether we coveted money or remained austere, whether we cheated on our spouse or not, and whether we were sorry or not, don’t really matter. As long as you are not doing something extremely good or extremely bad, it doesn’t really matter how you live. Even the extremes of good and bad only hold true under the subjective view of a conscious lifeform. Objectively, there is no good or bad and hence our lives become even more meaningless.

The purpose of life is to simply live. It is not to live in any kind of particular way. It is to just be alive, till you are not. So everybody is fulfilling this purpose by default. There is no inherent superiority or inferiority in any way of life. The monk and the businessman, the murderer and the housewife, the religious warrior and the atheist pacifist, are all the same. They are living life. One day they’ll die. No first prize trophies at the end, everybody gets the same participation certificate.

While you live, you will go through all emotions. Most people suffer most of the time but it is not by design. We suffer because of our own nature. We live unconsciously stuck in the illusory human world called maya. Being stuck in maya causes more suffering than happiness. On top of that, we try to avoid suffering and hold on to happiness which only exacerbates things. But it doesn’t matter which emotion we feel more of. A life of suffering is no different from a life of joy.

So objectively speaking, there is nothing wrong here. Nothing to understand. No mystery to solve. No way of life to choose. Nothing to do at all. You are doing it right, simply by being alive. Well done! Inhale, exhale, repeat. Beautifully done! Keep at it.

When you look at life objectively, it really takes the pressure off. The universe is following the second law of thermodynamics, we are alive to see this dance of entropy for a fraction of a second, and that’s about it. We can do whatever we want to do. Live in any way we think is best for us. Even a life spent trying to find the best way to live without ever really finding it, is okay. It’s all okay.

But subjectively, to us our life matters a lot. It’s everything. And since we are humans living in the human world, things get more complicated. There is the trap of maya. There is our nature to try and avoid pain. There is money, power, love, relationships, fashion, social media, image, ego, desires, dreams, fame, celebrity, distractions etc. Then our body makes things even more complex. We are also biological machines following the law of entropy and our brain produces thoughts and emotions which might simply be the result of a chemical reaction.

The brain is complex and it is the only tool we have to try and make sense of the just as complex human world. We can never truly trust our knowledge. We can use logic and reason but our brain is so crafty that when we become illogical, it still might seem completely logical to us.

Most people don’t question their brains. They have blind faith in their brains. And that seems to be the best way to live because it doesn’t matter what you do as long as you are convinced you are right. Justify it to yourself and that’s all you need. Cursed are those who are aware of the fickle nature of their mind. The idiot moves on confidently, destroying lives of those around him, completely unaware, without any guilt, confident that he’s right because his brain says so. Meanwhile, the philosopher is sitting on a boulder, brooding over epistemology, rendered paralyzed by the knowledge that there is no way to know what’s truly right and what’s truly wrong.

Let us learn from the idiot then. Don’t try to find absolute truth. If it makes any sense at all, do it. In the human world, doing is more important than thinking. Remind yourself that your life doesn’t matter anyhow. So stop living as if you are the king of the universe and if you don’t live the best life, or don’t always make the right decision, the universe will stop existing. Don’t think so much of yourself and don’t take yourself too seriously. Try to live the way you want to and when you don’t succeed at it fully, remind yourself that this too is okay.

Live the way you want to live, and if you can’t live that way, keep trying. From this point onward, there can’t be much generalized advice. Everyone wants to live differently and I can only talk about myself and how I want to live. But before I get into what I want, we need to talk about how to truly know what you want. And is it important, where you want originates?

A lot of our wants might just be the result of a lifetime of conditioning by advertising and consumerism. Some of our wants might be driven by our ego. Others by our biology. Does it matter where a want comes from? Especially since nothing matters. What does it even mean to live the way you want to? Is it the same as chasing all your wants? It isn’t. More importantly, you are up against society which wants you to live a certain way for its own benefit. So what you should really do is find a good enough way that you can live in and just do that.

In order to find out what I truly want, I need to start with how I’m living right now and what things I want to change. Right now I am living a lazy unfocused life. I don’t work at all. I daydream a lot. I sleep a lot. I watch a lot of video content. I don’t read, write, exercise, play guitar or even go out on my scooter. Apparently these are the things I want to do and freelance writing is the thing that I have to do in order to support these other things. But I don’t do freelance work and so I stop doing these things as well and end up doing nothing.

Objectively, there’s nothing wrong with this life but subjectively it’s very wrong. What’s wrong is not just that it’s unsustainable but also that it is not how I want to live at all. If money was no object and I was living this way, I wouldn’t be happy at all.

The paradox is that I started excessive daydreaming to escape sadness and now excessive daydreaming is making me sad because it’s stopping me from living the way I want to live. It’s exactly what happens with any drug. Addicts use drugs to escape pain and eventually the drugs bring even more pain to them. I’m addicted to daydreaming and I have to address that.

Everything Happens for a Reason

I never finished this entry in 2017. I must have written this in a rare moment of clarity because soon afterwards I got more depressed than I had ever been before. I moved out of my parent’s home and tried living on my own but that led to more depression. I finally went to a psychiatrist and started medication but that made things worse.

I had no memory that I was already thinking along these lines back then. Now I’m wondering what would have happened if I had continued along this line. I could have developed my philosophy 5 years sooner and probably would have avoided the worst years of my life. But as they say, everything happens for a reason. Perhaps I wasn’t ready to walk down this path yet.

The good news is that I am not living that kind of life anymore. It took a long time to get out of the depression and then to get hold of my feedback loops to start doing what I wanted to do. Turns out daydreaming wasn’t the main problem, it was just a symptom. The main problem was not understanding the vicious negative feedback loops I was stuck in. And for me, salvation lay in going deeper into philosophy. Reading this almost 9 years later has reignited my motivation to complete my philosophical project.