In the previous two posts I described what sensemaking means to me. It’s a lay philosophy project to figure out a worldview and life philosophy, without worrying about whether or not it is completely correct. The correction part is to be done throughout life, based on the feedback we get from reality. I wanted to do this to get clarity in my own mind about how to share my philosophy with the world. Explaining what I mean by sensemaking was definitely the first step.

I think the next step is to write a few more posts to quickly explain my worldview. I talked about the questions; “What the world is?” and “How to live in it?” Well, now the reader might be interested in knowing what exactly have I figured out about these two questions? I think by describing my views loosely in the next few blog posts, I’ll get further clarity about what essays I need to write after this series of posts.

So in this post, I want to describe my overall worldview in a loose and general way. Remember that this is sensemaking or lay philosophy and not academic philosophy or science. So I’m not claiming this worldview to be the absolute truth about the world. It’s just what makes sense to me. Maybe some of it will make sense to you too.

Naturalism

I believe that everything about the world, including the human world and human psychology, can be understood through natural explanations. There is no need to go into supernatural explanations or invoke deities. Everything we’ve understood so far has a natural explanation and this trend will continue, in my opinion.

This means that science is the best tool to understand the world. We might not understand everything fully right now, or perhaps even ever, but whatever we do understand, will be understood best through scientific and natural explanations.

According to science the universe exists, life exists and one species of animals has become an advanced technological civilization. How exactly this happened isn’t fully understood yet but we’re learning more every day.

What this view means is that when it comes to things like depression or feeling lost or having a meaning crisis, there is no need to think of it as something mystical or supernatural. It’s a common experience for humans in our time and both its explanation and solution can be derived from fully natural means.

In other words, there is no need to hopelessly search for meaning from somewhere, not knowing how you’d find it but sticking to the hope that one day a light will shine and fill the room and you’ll “just know” that you’ve got it now.

I don’t think that’s the best approach. You’re much better off trying to find natural explanations for such experiences and natural and practical solutions to your problems.

Atheism

A consequence of naturalism is atheism. There is no proof for the existence of any kind of god or supernatural beings. Those who believe literally that some kind of anthropomorphic god exists, are just plain wrong. By some magical coincidence it always happens to be the god of the religion these people are born into. I don’t know how they can believe that their god and religion is true while others who feel just as strongly about their own god and religion are wrong.

Then there are those who don’t take mythology literally. They say that different religions express in different ways, the same feeling that all humans felt all around the world. And this must mean that there is something like a god somewhere. All cultures felt it and gave it different names but the underlying thing must be something real.

I actually agree with this view in a way. There are things and forces in the universe that are so much more powerful than us, that they are like gods for us. For example, the sun is literally a god for us. When the sun dies, there will be no life on earth. The planet earth is also quite literally a god for us. And it’s easy to think of the fertile earth, out of which everything grows, as the mother god while the harsh sun is like a father god.

In fact, the universe is the ultimate god. If the universe dies, all life will die too. Everything in the universe, including you and me, is made up of the universe. Duh! So we can think of the universe as one omnipresent being.

But where I draw the line is at omnipotent. Does the universe know that I exist and that I’m an atheist? Is the universe watching us and judging our actions? Or the sun or mother earth? I don’t think so. These gods of mine are not conscious and don’t care one way or the other about us and our petty lives. There’s no point in worshiping them or praying to them and asking them to help us.

I’m sure humans experienced such incredible forces when they saw the ocean or climbed a mountain for the first time. Or when they faced the fury of a natural disaster like a storm or earthquake. They experienced awe in these moments and then made up stories about gods to make sense of it. But that doesn’t mean that some kind of god created us and pays attention to us.

Imagine if a bacteria that lives in your gut was praying to you and saying, “oh almighty human, please help me in my life.” If you could somehow hear it you’d be like, “Who’s there? Who said that?” And if then you somehow could see the bacteria too, you’d say, “Who the fuck are you and why should I care?”

Now take that scale and raise it to the power of 4. A bacteria is to us, as we are to the planet. And the planet is like a bacteria for the solar system. And the solar system is like a bacteria for the galaxy. And the galaxy is like a bacteria for the universe. We are to the universe as a quantum particle is to us. We are nothing. We don’t exist. The universe will have to build a particle accelerator just to capture a snapshot of our lives.

Existential Nihilism

And this view then leads us nicely to existential nihilism. What is the meaning of life? Objectively speaking, there is no meaning. There is no purpose for which an individual was born. There is no real purpose for entire humanity either. We just happen to exist for a short amount of time.

This is where people begin panicking. If there is no meaning to life, then why bother living at all? Why do anything? Why bother getting out of bed?

But is it okay to reject something that seems rational and logical just because we don’t like the direction it is taking us? This view seems to be the most reasonable one to me and I think the first step should be to accept it. Don’t jump to conclusions about what kind of life it might lead to. Let’s just sit with it and see what happens.

That means that if you feel “why should I do anything?” then fine, don’t do anything for a while. I went through this process and I found that eventually I got hungry and the animal in me went out looking for food.

We can stop believing in every narrative and explanation that gives us meaning and feel like there’s no point in doing anything but we can’t stop believing in hunger. Or thirst or pain. We’re animals; biological living being; and we have needs and drives that make us move.

Meaning was a crutch that humanity used for a long time but that doesn’t mean it’s necessary. We can figure out how to live without meaning. I’ll explain how in the next post. But for now it’s enough to understand that even after accepting existential nihilism, there are basic human needs that still need to be met.

If you think, “well why should I meet even the basic needs if life is meaningless” then all I can say to you is, “go ahead and try to stop eating because life is meaningless. It will become apparent to you soon.”

There’s a difference between arguing intellectually and the actual lived reality of being an animal. And since we are humans who live in society for mutual benefit, fulfilling our needs means participating in society and that gets us to a very simple life of creating value for others to earn money to meet your own value consumption needs.

The Three Worlds

So I’m a naturalist, atheist and existential nihilist. This sets up the foundation of my world view. It might seem too bleak to you but I’m not interested in finding inspiration or meaning. I’m trying to make sense of the world as well as I can so that I can figure out how to live.

From this foundation, the next thing to understand about the world is that it is not just one world that we are trying to understand. We inhabit three worlds simultaneously. If we get the three mixed up, it causes confusion and unnecessary suffering. Let’s discuss them one by one.

The Physical World

Being physical beings, we obviously inhabit the physical world. We’ve advanced so much that the physical world isn’t usually such a big problem for us. We think that we’ve mastered the physical world but of course nature disabuses us of this notion from time to time.

In today’s world we often don’t pay attention to the physical world at all because of how safe we’ve made it. But if you were to find yourself in the Serengeti, being chased by a lion, you’d stop existing in the other two worlds and be fully present only in the physical world. The stress of career, finances, relationships will disappear and the only thing that will matter is the lion and you and the physical world.

The best way to understand the physical world is through science. The hard sciences of physics, chemistry, biology have understood the physical world pretty well, even if there are still things we don’t fully understand, like quantum physics. But for us laymen and our regular life, we understand the physical world well enough and there’s not much to think about here.

The Human World

The more important world that we inhabit is the human world. This is the world of politics and economics. The world of systems that we’ve created to manage ourselves. This is the world of social hierarchies, law and order, morals, norms and conventions. The world of manners, tact and diplomacy. The world of lies and manipulation. The world of money and wealth and oppression. Also the world of racism, sexism, casteism and other forms of ingroup preference. The world where some powerful people can declare a war and drop a bomb from a drone on your head even though you never did anything to them.

This world is tremendously complex. The soft sciences of economics, sociology, political science, history etc. try to understand this world. But the theories of the soft sciences should not be considered to be at the same level as the hard sciences.

There are many ways to understand the human world. We can describe it using any number of frameworks, each one focusing on a different goal. There is no absolute truth to be found here.

Much of this world is understood through narratives. Narratives help us not just make sense of the world but also tell us what it all means and what should matter to us. In this way narratives do a form of compression or simplification. Believing these narratives to be the absolute truth has led humans to pursue many great acts; great acts of good as well as great acts of evil.

The Internal World

Finally we inhabit our own internal world. In one sense we’re all trapped inside our own internal worlds. We look at both the human world and the physical world from inside our internal world. This adds an extra layer of difficulty when it comes to understanding the other two worlds. Our thoughts and emotions affect not just how we see, but what we see in the other two worlds.

Psychology tries to understand the internal world. But psychology is possibly the softest of the sciences. It is practically just philosophy. Cognitive science, evolutionary psychology, neuroscience are attempts at bringing harder scientific practices to the task of understanding our internal world and they have been improving our understanding. But since no one can inhabit your internal world except you, this is one realm that only you can be the expert in.

One mistake that people often make, and I used to do this as well, is to think of the internal world as only the mind. I use the term ‘internal’ instead of ‘mental’ to signify this difference. Your internal world includes both your mind and your body. Your physiology, your hormones, your gut microbiome, your neurotransmitters, outside stimulants and drugs, can all affect your mind and so these are part of your internal world.

Have Your Experience

This is in short what the world looks like to me. I’ll be expanding each of these topics and more in the essays I’m planning to write soon. But by now you might be asking, “okay bro, this is quite a bleak view. But if life is meaningless and there’s no god or anything, then what according to you are we supposed to do in our life?”

So let me end with this. If you stick with me you’ll see that this view only seems bleak but is actually incredibly liberating. For example, one consequence of this view is that there is no way to do life wrong. There’s literally nothing you can do in your life that when you die, your life would have been a failure. When you die, no one will be handing out medals to those who lived life well and no one will say to you, “what the fuck did you do in your life you loser!”

When you, me and (enter most successful person’s name here) will die, we’ll all simply stop existing. Our consciousness is an emergent phenomenon. When we die it simply disappears. No one will win any trophies. So no need to worry about whether your life is a success or failure.

In the end, we’re all just having an experience called life. We’re lucky enough that the universe arranged itself in such complex forms as us, that our consciousness could exist.

Since we are made up of the universe, in one way, it is the universe experiencing itself through us. The universe is experiencing how it feels to be Rudya. It’s a short experience. There’s no guarantee that the experience will be always pleasant. But whatever it is, it’s your unique experience.

There’s nothing to do. Nothing to pursue. No success to achieve. No failure mode.

If you spend the rest of your days being anxious and worrying about the meaning of life, then that’s the experience you had. It’s not a failure or success. It’s just what you had.

The main goal of my philosophy and my life is to intentionally choose what kind of experience I want to have, without getting too attached to the outcome. I want to have the experience of someone who tries to intentionally choose their experiences.

This is not about trying to control my life or avoiding all bad experiences. Life will still throw punches. My own actions will cause me suffering. But I find that suffering that is caused by me is more tolerable than suffering that feels unearned. And even if my life is full of incredible unearned suffering, that’s just the experience I will have. So be it.

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