Last month I published my first proper philosophy essay, On Narrative Orientation and Sensemaking, and I was really proud of how much work I put into developing it. My process so far has been to write the essay and then see if parts of it feel amateurish and then try to think about why it is so.

I realized that the amateur vibe comes from claiming too much or from jumping to conclusions too soon. When I published the essay, I thought I had removed all such parts but after a couple of weeks, I began feeling the same vibe with some parts of what I had written.

In the essay, I create a new framework to look at the world. I take the concept of orientation and widen it. I say that like animals need to orient in the physical world they also need to orient in their social world. Then I say that since the human social world is highly complex, we need more than instinctive behaviors to orient ourselves. I say that this is the need of narrative orientation and that we fulfill this need through meaningmaking. I defined meaningmaking as narrative orientation but with belief in the narratives being true. I said that this belief in the truth of the narratives is the problem and I provided the solution of sensemaking to deal with it. Sensemaking means to provisionally accept narratives without believing them to be true.

I think up till the part where I describe narrative orientation, my work is pretty solid. It’s a genuinely new way of looking at things and there is genuine value in thinking about the world in this way.

But after that is when I start making amateurish jumps again. I realized that it’s much easier to see other people’s narratives as just narratives than one’s own narratives. I also realized that it is possible to intellectually accept that most of what we believe is just a narrative, but it is not so easy to stop believing them.

Even I myself, when I am sitting back and thinking about my narratives, I can think of them as narratives but when I need to act, I act as if they’re true.

This made me realize that perhaps sensemaking is not the solution I thought it to be. Perhaps meaningmaking is necessary to live as a human being and we can’t avoid it. If this is true then my philosophy becomes just a description of what humans do, without any prescription about how to solve the problem.

And actually that makes me feel better about my philosophy. I’ve been suspicious of ideas that provide clear solutions. Perhaps sensemaking is not something that can replace meaningmaking but become a procedure of periodically auditing our narratives to see if our suffering is caused by poor allignment of our narratives.

I need to explore this idea of narrative orientation further and read about related ideas that others have developed. I’ve also decided to stop trying to build my sensemaking system. The whole philosophy as a software system is also amateurish but more importantly it’s premature. I need to just write essays on different topics and develop my thinking further and then I can see if it all fits into a system.

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