I wrote an 11K word document to explain my philosophy and learned a few important lessons. The most important of these being that this project to develop my own philosophy reeks of amateur naivety and delusional grandiosity.

Whenever I’ve tried to write down the entirety of my ideas and thoughts, I’ve realized that first, I’ve got an opinion about everything, and second, I come across as having very strong delusions of grandeur. (That’s something I worry about myself and I wrote about it here.) The last time I tried this, I crossed 50K words and knew immediately that I was never going to publish or share it with anyone. This time I got it down to 11k but it still feels too amateurish to share.

The reason for this feeling is that it is the work of an untrained amateur. But I have a very strong desire to do this right. There are many individuals like me who have blogs about a big idea or theory they’ve developed about the world and they might think, “if only people took the time to read my corpus of work, they’d see that I’ve solved a major issue for humanity!” They might feel incredibly frustrated that nobody understands them.

I don’t want to be like them. I’m not saying that all these people are wrong. Many of them might even be on to something great, but no one has the time, or patience, to engage with an entire galaxy of ideas that is completely new to them. The authors of such works spend years obsessing over these ideas but for a newcomer they’re too overwhelming to even begin. And for someone like me, I have an entire galaxy of my own, so it is very hard for me to try and get into someone else’s framework and understand what their terms mean and relate what they’re saying to my own work.

If I can’t do it myself, I can’t expect others to do it with my work. I don’t want to build that kind of a corpus. I want to learn to do things the right way. As I was writing this document, I began by first giving up the Nihilism branding I’ve been sticking to. Then I even gave up calling it philosophy and called it sensemaking. But eventually, the final letting go came in the form of giving up on trying to build “my philosophy”.

Instead, what I want to do is just explore and learn and study and share my journey. Don’t get me wrong, I still think a lot of my ideas are pretty close to the truth and I’m still going to apply them to my life. I’m just going to keep it as a personal philosophy. Even if it wasn’t amateurish, to do it right, I should test it in my life for at least a few years, before sharing it with others. That gives me time to learn philosophy and explore the landscape of ideas; for I’m sure that I’m just combining ideas in a unique way, and not really coming up with brand new ideas that much.

The other reason for this decision is that I don’t want this philosophy project to consume me. I don’t want to spend years locked in my room with people worrying about me and me trying to explain to them that I’m doing something incredibly important and then dying without producing anything.

There is no way for me to know whether I’m on to something real or not, but I do know that if I allow myself to pursue only philosophy, obsessively, then at least partly, I would be using it as an escape mechanism to avoid having to live in the real world. I’ve done that before with daydreaming and I could be using philosophy now to do it.

So, living life is my main goal. Philosophy is just a side project.

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