Iterative Rational Sensemaking

A Practical Philosophy for Rational People

Version 1.3

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Introduction

This is a primer to the philosophy I’m developing, which is provisionally called Iterative Rational Sensemaking. I use the term sensemaking to signify the “lay” or “indie” nature of my philosophy. Sensemaking means to orient oneself in the world. Philosophers do philosophy, but everyone does sensemaking in one way or another. I’m not a professional academic philosopher. I’m just a human being trying to make sense. I also use sensemaking because I want to encourage everyone to do their own thinking and their own sensemaking.

Hence, I’m presenting my ideas about the world that I’ve developed by my sensemaking work, but also presenting how I did this sensemaking work. You can disagree with my worldview and still get some tips about how to do your own sensemaking.

The ideas I present here are descriptive and not prescriptive. I’m not trying to preach anything, except perhaps the fact that everyone should do their own sensemaking. To that effect, I want to make a universal disclaimer right at the beginning.

I don’t write in an academic style with lots of qualifications and warnings before and after every claim because that becomes too tedious to read. I write in a confident voice but this doesn’t mean that I’m asserting these claims as universal truths. As you’ll see, a core tenet of my philosophy is to not worry about discovering absolute truth and instead consider everything to be provisionally true at best. Constant updates and iteration are a core feature of my methodology. So, all claims below are provisional and open to change on receiving new data or reasoning.

I also want to note that this isn’t a detailed defense of my thesis. I do not show my arguments and I do not provide my responses to common objections. I just present some of my conclusions. It is a starting point for anyone interested in my philosophy, as well as a clarifying document for me as I develop my arguments further.

The first thing to realize is that humans have to orient themselves in three worlds simultaneously:

1. The Physical World
2. The Human World
3. The Internal World

Therefore, the structure of this document is divided into these three worlds, followed by a section on my methodology and then the last section that covers the practical application of these ideas in my own life. Although I’m presenting only the most necessary ideas to describe my philosophy, my Minimum Viable Philosophy, if you will, there’s still a lot to go through and I do this quickly, so it might feel a bit rushed. But remember that this is just a primer and each claim will be developed in full detail later.

I hope that you might find some of these practical applications useful. If not, I hope the least you get from this document is tinder for your own sensemaking.

The Physical World

All living beings have to do sensemaking in order to operate in the world. For most organisms, it simply means orienting themselves in their physical environment. Similarly for humans, orienting our body in three dimensional space comes naturally. Whatever other orienting we need to do in our mind, about the physical world, it should be based on the latest scientific consensus.

Science

As far as the physical world goes, science is our best tool for understanding it. This is proven by the fact that science can predict a lot of things about the physical world accurately and consistently. In fact, all of our technology works because science understands how the physical world works.

This is a good way to define truth. Truth is what aligns well with reality. Absolute truth would be the absolute objective reality itself. But we don’t need absolute truth. If we can find theories that align close enough to reality for us to consistently predict things, like science does, then that is enough truth for our purposes. Science might never know the absolute truth about the core fundamental reality of the universe, but it knows reality at our scale, well enough for our purpose of sensemaking.

There is no need to do metaphysics anymore, except if we think of it as ‘metaphorical physics’ that focuses more on attaching meaning to the physical world to soothe ourselves, and less on literal understanding of the physical world.

We all know the story science tells us about how we got here. It starts with the Big Bang, moves through the formation of stars and planets, to the emergence of life at least on our little planet, and ends with the evolution of Homo sapiens.

This story has many details that science is still trying to figure out. But these questions are for scientists to solve. For philosophers and lay sensemakers, it is enough to know that this story is the most probable one we have.

We’re Just Animals

Humans are just one of many species of life on earth. We are certainly unique in our combination of tool building, language use, intelligence and sociability and our ability to shape the environment to our needs. But we aren’t as different from animals as we used to think. We’ve been guilty of human exceptionalism in the past but now science is recognizing that many other species might have some similar capabilities, though definitely not the entire package. It’s fair to say that underneath all the complexity, humans are just animals.

Life is Meaningless

The biggest implication of this fact is that our lives are objectively as meaningless as any other animal’s. In other words, existential nihilism is an inevitable result of doing rational sensemaking.

In the past, this led to the meaning crisis and philosophers tried to deal with it in many ways. At this point, I’d like to just assert that in my opinion, we have no choice but to accept existential nihilism. The loss of meaning, in my opinion, is not such a big deal that it justifies rejecting reason itself. Later, I’ll get into why meaning isn’t necessary for sensemaking.

Biological Suffering

The last thing I want to say in this section is that because we are just animals, it is important to recognize that a certain amount of suffering is inevitable in our lives. I call it Biological Suffering.

Pain is an important signal for living beings. Living beings are also usually soft and squishy and get easily hurt or killed in the hard physical world. Death is the ultimate suffering that individual members of all species have to go through in order for evolution to occur so the species can continue surviving in the forever changing environment. In fact, nature is an endless cycle of death and consumption.

To summarize, life is objectively meaningless, suffering is an inherent part of life and we’re just animals, albeit with a level of complexity, unseen in any other species. This view of the physical world might not be comforting or inspirational, but it is most probably the closest to reality.

The Human World

All social animals inhabit the world of their social structure alongside the physical world. For most animals, orienting in this second social world is also instinctual and simple. Only humans have created a social world so complex, that orientation becomes complicated.

The human world is the world of our global civilization, nations and governments. It is the world of global supply chains, complex logistics and international trade. It is the world of money, career and debt. It is the world of power, politics and propaganda. It is the world of religions, gods and myths. Of ego, reputation and bloodlines. It is the world of borders, war and genocide. Basically, it is the world that we humans have created with our ideas and concepts.

Emergent Intelligence

Much of this world was developed by the emergent intelligence of humanity, not some individual human, although many key individuals provided significant input from time to time. By emergent intelligence of humanity, I mean that many of these systems evolved on their own to allow humans to collaborate in large numbers. We figured out how to collaborate with strangers because it was evolutionarily beneficial for humanity. It might even be that what set homo sapiens apart from other hominids was our ability to cooperate at scale.

Society

Whether by conscious design, or by evolutionary elimination, or a bit of both, humanity has been developing systems and conceptual tools that help us to build larger and larger societies. Right up to now when, in many ways, we’re already a single global civilization. This allows individual humans to specialize in small niches and together we can produce a lot more value for everyone, than we could as isolated tribes who produced value only for their own consumption.

These systems and tools help us to organize large numbers of humans, handle complex logistics, allow us to cooperate with strangers, allow individuals to specialize while still being able to meet all their needs etc. One of the more important functions of these tools is to do the sensemaking for the individuals and provide them with readymade maps of meaning about reality to help them navigate it.

Storytelling

This complex human world began with our natural tendency to tell stories. We are curious and intelligent animals who can match patterns and assign agency. We developed an awareness of the passing of time and cognizance of the past and future. Constructing narratives was our way of explaining the world to ourselves. Storytelling began as a natural instinct but we honed our storytelling techniques and also turned it into a tool for sensemaking.

Religion

The stories that explained the world in the best way, that is to say, the stories that aligned with reality the closest, became myths. Myths were collected and organized to form religion. Religion is like a Social Operating System. It does many things for humanity. It helps us organize and collaborate. It helps with social cohesion. Simultaneously it also helps us dehumanize competing groups who worship a different god. More importantly for our present discussion, religion helps individuals outsource sensemaking to the group.

Religion provides us with a complete story about what the world is, why we’re here, what we’re supposed to do and what will happen after we die. It provides us with existential meaning and a purpose for our life. But it also provides structures and systems that help individuals who are struggling with doubt. It provides safety nets for those who feel lost. It provides community and socialization. Even if you don’t fully believe the meaning of life, religion provides you with enough mechanisms to keep going without getting completely lost.

Meaning

Meaning is a specific solution to the sensemaking problem. If sensemaking is orientation then, meaning is orientation plus narrative, multiplied by faith.

Meaning = Orientation + Narrative x Faith

It doesn’t just help you orient yourself in the world but also provides you with a soothing story. And if you have faith in this story then you have a very strong and robust solution to the problem of sensemaking. This is such a good solution that when reason led humanity towards the realization that our religions are not based on truth and the myths are just stories and objectively life is meaningless, we had a crisis about it because we were so coddled by this great solution.

Ideologies

Even though religion has weakened in certain cultures, it is still going strong in majority of the world. When religion began losing ground, other ideologies (such as nationalism, humanism, liberalism, communism, capitalism etc.) took its place. These ideologies claim to be secular but are built upon the same faith based structure of religion. From the point of view of sensemaking, these ideologies are an even poorer substitute of religion because the meaning they provide is often one dimensional and they lack the comprehensive meaning and social structures of religion.

The Default Path

Everyone is born into a worldview and has a path laid out in front of them by default. This default path depends upon many factors such as the socio-economic status of your parents, the religion and culture you’re born into, your nationality, gender etc. It might not be the best path for an individual in terms of life satisfaction and personal fulfillment, but it is the easiest path to stick to and the least risky path that will ensure their survival.

In the past, religion worked really well as a sensemaking tool and most people were happy to follow the default path they were born into because they weren’t even aware that they could choose something different. As the world got smaller and different civilizations met each other, people became aware of different worldviews and life philosophies. Today the world is extremely connected and sensemaking tools such as religion struggle to convince their followers as well as fail to update fast enough to remain useful.

The Sensemaking Crisis

What was recognized as the meaning crisis, is in fact a breakdown of the sensemaking systems. It’s not just that people lost faith in the stories, they also became disoriented in the human world.

The focus on meaning, hides the deeper problem of the sensemaking crisis. When we think of it as the meaning crisis, it becomes a deeply mystical and existential crisis that seems difficult to solve. The only viable options seem like either re-enchanting ourselves into believing an updated version of old religions, or building a completely new religion that simultaneously does two opposite things: gives us meaning that we can believe in, but also doesn’t ask us to show blind faith.

It is surely true that despite having outsourced sensemaking to the group via religion, most people in the past had to do at least some sensemaking on their own. There was no time when everyone had complete faith and was fully at peace with their understanding of life and the world. So, when the tools like religion stopped working, people found their own way to do sensemaking.

I believe that the correct diagnosis of our current state is that this is a sensemaking issue. Humans can, and do, try to make sense on their own already. We just need to learn how to do it in a way so that our worldview aligns closely to reality. Why align it closely to reality? Because the closer it aligns, the better we can use our map and achieve our goals and reduce unnecessary suffering.

My main thesis is that we don’t need meaning in our lives, we need to learn how to do our own sensemaking in a better way.

Lay Sensemaking

Today people do sensemaking in many ways. They try to pick and choose what works for them from different religions and spiritual traditions, salvaging what they can from the wreckage of these old behemoths.

Following the ideologies that replaced religion with the same zeal is one way to find a purpose (if not meaning) for one’s life. Some people replace meaning with things like pursuit of happiness, success, pursuit of one’s passions, productivity and self-improvement.

Another phenomenon people use is to focus on identity and aesthetics of subcultures as a way to define themselves and their life. The different conspiracy theories that many people like to indulge in, is also an attempt at sensemaking. It’s like metaphysics but for the human world. We could even call it metasociology. Such people don’t need to be ridiculed, canceled or ignored, but taught how to do better sensemaking.

Simultaneously people also use coping mechanisms to deal with a lack of proper sensemaking in their life. Some of these coping mechanisms are distracting oneself with content consumption and social media, chasing pleasure in sex, food, alcohol and drugs, endless consumerism etc. (To be clear, not everyone who indulges in these things is using it as a coping mechanism. There are other reasons why people do these things and even get addicted to them.)

Despite all these methods, people are still suffering from the sensemaking crisis. Rising rates of loneliness, depression, etc. are a sign that people are lost and suffering.

Society-Caused Suffering

Just like the physical world, the human world also causes suffering. I call it Society-Caused Suffering. This is the suffering that comes from participating in the human world. Unlike the physical world, this suffering is entirely our own fault as society.

At the benign end it can be as small as the emotional suffering of jealousy caused when your neighbor buys a new car, and on the other extreme it is the suffering of war and genocide where millions are killed for one or the other completely manmade belief. Since we create the human world, this suffering can be controlled and minimized if we understand our world abstractly and then build better systems. We might not be able to eliminate this suffering completely but we can certainly do a lot to reduce it significantly.

The Human World is an Illusion

On an individual level, we can reduce a lot of the suffering by simply realizing that this human world is not real. In Indian philosophy there is the concept of maya, which means ‘the illusory world’. In Hinduism maya is probably understood literally and the physical world itself is considered illusory, but when we separate the physical and human worlds, we can see how this second world at least is definitely an illusion.

If there was a major catastrophe like a meteor strike, our human world would collapse and none of it will mean anything. We’d be reduced to animals looking for food and mates once again. The veil of maya would be lifted and we’d see the truth of our being. The illusion only persists because it is collectively believed.

Having said that, it is not easy to choose to not participate in this illusory human world. The few who decide to break this illusion are considered either weird or enlightened. Only few can become non-participating weirdos. But just remembering that the human world is an illusion will help you to not get too caught up in it and reduce the suffering you experience, as well as inflict on others, by at least a little bit.

The Internal World

The third world that humans have to navigate is the internal world that exists within each individual. Animals probably also have an internal world but it must not be as complex as ours. Probably mostly because of our use of language that allows us to think abstract thoughts and build an entire universe of ideas and concepts.

The words soul, mind and consciousness all point to aspects of this internal world. I choose to call it the internal world to incorporate the body into it as well. It is not just the brain that affects our internal world but our entire body, (including even the bacteria in our guts) as well as the lived experience of our body in the physical world.

In terms of improving our lives as individuals, it is probably the most important of the three worlds to understand and also the hardest. It is important because it affects how an individual perceives the other two worlds and their experience in these worlds is filtered through their internal world. It is hard, (but not impossible) because of the paradox of trying to understand our mind by using our mind.

Consciousness

On the question of consciousness, there seem to be much discussions in the public sphere. I think the most probable explanation is that consciousness is an emergent phenomenon. When matter arranges itself in the form of a body of a living being which has senses (and a brain) that allow it to interact with and experience the physical world, consciousness emerges.

Simpler organisms have a simple consciousness. Animals have more complex consciousnesses with humans having the most complex consciousness of all. We can’t locate the source of our consciousness because emergent properties don’t reside in a specific location. They emerge out of the complexity of the underlying structure.

Heart vs Brain

Another way of thinking of the mind is as the operating system of the biological machine. We are basically organic robots that are very complex in design and can operate on their own in the world and even self-replicate. This complexity in design is very similar to the complexity of machine learning algorithms. They are both not really designed but use evolutionary emergence to solve problems.

The way our mind works, along with our senses and our internal regulatory biochemical systems is a highly complex and finetuned system that allows us to operate in the world.

The problem with humans is that we basically have two operating systems in our mind. One is the older instinctive and emotion based operating system which most probably we share with animals. The other is a more recent thought based operating system which probably emerged after we began using language and our thinking got more complex. We’re always struggling between these two operating systems which in popular culture is often referred to as the heart vs brain struggle.

Because of this complexity, it is very difficult for science to fully understand how we work. In the future science might learn a lot about us, but for now we have very little true understanding of our internal world. But from a sensemaking perspective we just need to use our best current understanding, the one that aligns closest to the reality of our internal world, to orient ourselves in this world.

Personalities

One of the things we understand at a big picture level is that individual humans have differing personalities. We’re not all the same. Which makes most of older life philosophies highly limited because it was always assumed that there was only one way of living the good life which would work for everyone. But now we know that that can’t be true.

Different personalities have different ways of looking at the world and different desires and goals. We can even consider intelligence as a personality trait. As sensemakers, it is important to understand one’s own personality and not to ignore the fact that other people might be different.

Self-Casued Suffering

The internal world is also where most of our suffering comes from. I call it Self-Caused Suffering. Even though it is completely “in our heads” so to speak, it is still as real for the individual as any suffering of the physical or human world. I want to recognize the real-ness of this suffering before saying that much of it is unnecessary.

Most of us have experienced it ourselves where sometimes when we change our thinking, suddenly something that was causing us a lot of suffering, stops bothering us. Technically, we should be able to do such context switching for most of our self-caused suffering but I understand that it is easier said than done. Basically, we can be as miserable as we let ourselves become.

How to do Rational Sensemaking

As I mentioned above, people already do their own sensemaking in many ways. I’m not here to tell you which one to choose. Different personality types will be attracted to different ways of sensemaking. There is no one “best” way.

But if, like me, you’re a bit of an overthinker and you care more about discovering the truth than other things like beauty, motivation or intellectual comfort, and you also want to do it yourself, because you can’t trust anyone, then you should consider rational sensemaking.

The first thing to understand to do rational sensemaking is that when you think about something, or listen to or read someone, it is not enough that the argument “just makes sense”. That feeling of, “yup, that seems about right” is not enough to know the truth. Our mind is very good at fooling itself. We have biases and blind spots that we’re just not aware of. If we truly care about the truth, then we have to use methods to look out for our biases and shed a light on our blind spots.

In simple terms you do this by learning critical thinking skills. A quick internet search will tell you that critical thinking involves learning about logical fallacies and perhaps learning some logic and how to check whether an argument is logically sound or not.

All of these are good to know about but even just learning to question what someone says to you, or even your own thoughts, is a good start. Watch out for what makes you uncomfortable. If you feel a resistance to checking up a certain fact or a certain argument, then it is a sign that you’re butting up against a bias of yours. Lean into the resistance and dare to be intellectually uncomfortable.

Analytical Reading

One method I’ve developed to check my own thinking is to write down my thoughts freely, leave them alone for a few days, and then come back and do an analytical reading of my own writing. That means to go through the writing and extract only the logical claims that I’ve made. Ignore the fluff and the rhetorical tricks like appeals to authority or emotions.

Then consider the logical statements and see if they build a sound argument. This is a good way to discover if you have any hidden assumptions which you’ve taken for granted. It will also help you to isolate the core statements so you can check sources and empirical data to see how close to truth those statements are. Of course, it is also a good idea to do such analytical reading of other writers.

Practical Application Principles

When you choose rational sensemaking, it is important to remember that the main reason you’re doing this is to improve your own life, at the minimum. Which is why the main output of this sensemaking is something I like to call Practical Application Principles or PAPs for short.

These aren’t strict rules but they aren’t rough guidelines either. They are distilled principles of my philosophy focused on practical application instead of theoretical debate. The idea is that we don’t need to have endless debates and try to prove theoretically, which philosophy is correct or closer to the truth.

Instead, we should simply apply the philosophy in our life and see how well it works. The one that works the best is closest to being true. This allows us to take the feedback of our lived experience and refine our sensemaking.

So here are some PAPs I’ve developed so far. If you think they make sense, try them in your life and see if they make a difference. If they don’t, develop your own PAPs that suit your personality and your life situation.

Living Without Meaning

I said earlier that meaning is just orientation with narrative that you have faith in. Rational sensemaking provides you the orientation and my claim is that the narrative and faith aren’t necessary to live life.

One question some people ask is, “if life is meaningless, then why live? Why do anything? Why even get out of bed?”

The answer is simply that because you’re a living being, you can’t help but live. Try staying in bed because life is meaningless and see how long you can do it. You can’t literally stop living just because you’ve lost meaning.

What happens is that you feel grief when you lose meaning and that makes you depressed and you think you might as well not live. But you can’t “not live”. So, you might as well try to figure out how to live without meaning.

Rational sensemaking helps you understand the world and feel better about not having a meaning anymore. That’s already a start.

If you think about it, what did meaning really give you that made life worth living? It’s not like those who believe in a meaning to live, have it easy. Life is still hard and you still have to do sensemaking and suffer in life. What you got from meaning was just existential comfort and certainty.

Whether you have a meaning or not, what you actually need to live life are two things: a goal, aim or direction for long term planning and a way to know what to do on a day to day basis. The day to day routine is filled easily for modern humans especially with having to work to earn money, but rational sensemaking helps you figure out what you should prioritize in your daily routine. It is the long term direction in life which people struggle with when they lose meaning.

The answer to this problem is that you’re completely free to choose any direction you want. As long as you have a direction to move in, it doesn’t matter what it is. It is better to even pick a random direction than to be directionless.

Meaning gives you a readymade direction and certainty about that direction. But meaning can also feel stifling if your personality doesn’t match that direction. Existential nihilism gives you the freedom to pick your own direction, as well as the freedom to change it and update it as you learn more about yourself and life.

No Way to Do Life Wrong

Whatever you choose as your goal or direction in life, just know that there is no way to do life wrong. That is a positive corollary to existential nihilism.

Because, objectively, life is meaningless, there’s no way to win or lose in life. Your choices only matter subjectively to you. The quality of your experience will depend on what choices you make. So, your choices are still important for you but don’t let them paralyze you by thinking that if you make the wrong choices, you might end up failing at life.

There’s nothing that you “must” do. Don’t put too much pressure on yourself because you’re trying to win at life.

Meet Your Basic Needs

In the internal world section, I mentioned how the internal world is the whole complex of human body, brain and internal systems. We might not fully understand this system but we can come to a general conclusion about our internal world: it evolved for a specific lifestyle. And that is the hunter gatherer lifestyle. Civilization and our sedentary lifestyle are too recent for evolution to have figured out how to deal with them.

This means that our body has certain basic needs that need to be met, otherwise the entire internal system, including both the physical as well as the mental systems go out of balance.

When our internal world is not balanced, it not just creates its own suffering, but it also means that we perceive the human world and the physical world through a distorted filter and our sensemaking breaks down, leading to further suffering in those worlds as well. Our modern lifestyle, goes against many of our basic needs and that is certainly a big factor as to why so many humans suffer from physical, mental and sensemaking issues.

I do not mean to say that those who’re not meeting their basic needs are wrong or living a bad life or can’t find happiness. All I mean is that if you’re trying to improve the quality of your life and you want to do it rationally, then maybe give this principle a try. It makes sense philosophically that meeting these needs would lead to a more balanced internal world. But if you don’t think that these things are that important, then that’s fine too. As I said, there is no way to do life wrong.

Air, Water, Food

When we think of basic needs, we usually think of air, water and food before everything else. And all of us do meet these needs, because otherwise we wouldn’t survive. One thing to note about our civilized modern world is that we have been sacrificing the quality of these needs in many ways, which is not good. So, you might want to consider how you’re fulfilling these needs and take conscious control of it.

After these three we usually talk about things like shelter, medicine, sanitation etc. but those are the basic needs of the modern human being. Instead, we need to think about the basic needs that evolution requires of our body.

Sleep

I think sleep is one such basic need which we tend to ignore or massively undervalue in our modern world. We’ve begun understanding the importance of sleep but even now many people think of it as a waste of time. But sleep is necessary for survival, not just in the sense that sleep deprivation can literally kill living beings, but that sleep allows us to heal, learn and grow.

Sleep improves the quality of life when we’re awake. It doesn’t make sense to sacrifice sleep to spend more time being awake if the overall quality of life deteriorates and what we do with this extra time is just suffer in different ways.

We need to reprioritize sleep. You can search modern scientific research and learn about the importance of sleep and how to improve it. Here I’ll quickly summarize what I’ve learned so far.

To improve sleep we have to pay attention to light exposure. Make sure you get light exposure first thing after you wake up. It doesn’t matter what time you wake up, just let your body absorb some sunlight at that time, and your body will automatically begin to reset the body clock. Light exposure at dusk can also help the body recalibrate the circadian rhythm. After sunset, we need to avoid too much bright light, especially blue light or cool light. Unfortunately, that’s the kind of light all screens emit.

Physical Exertion/Movement

The next basic need we need to meet is the need for physical exertion and movement, especially through outdoor space, and at that, natural spaces would be the best. That’s what we evolved for and being indoors, staring at a screen all the time is causing imbalances that we don’t fully understand.

Physical exertion doesn’t necessarily mean fitness and workouts, although improving fitness is also important. But I think it’s important to think of it as exertion instead of fitness.

Hunter gatherers did not do pushups or burpees. They just moved through the forests and chased prey and climbed trees. We too can get physical exertion and movement in our life by simply walking more, maybe cycling to work, or taking the stairs etc. You don’t have to be a gym bro to get physical exertion in your life.

Socialization

Another basic need is that of socialization. Humans are social animals and we stay balanced when we get enough socialization. I like to talk about socialization instead of relationships or love, because we need all kinds of social interactions.

From low level conversations with acquaintances and strangers to deep relationships based on love. Since many people already suffer from loneliness and social anxiety and feel a lot of pressure to get into a relationship, I don’t want to pile on the pressure on them.

If you suffer from social anxiety, you can start by getting low level interactions in your day. Just smiling and saying hello, please and thank you to the people you meet throughout the day, can be a start. These can sometimes lead to short conversations and eventually maybe even friendships. The point is not to put too much pressure on oneself to find love or get into deep relationships right away. The need is for socialization and you can meet at least some of it without being too vulnerable.

Pursuit

Pursuit is also a basic need for humans. I define pursuit as the cycle of aiming, anticipating, struggling, achieving.

Hunter gatherers fulfilled this need directly by pursuing prey or gathering food or finding a mate. For us this need has become the core of many behaviors. In our modern world, we can easily fulfill this need by doing very easy things, which has meant that we struggle to do difficult things.

For example, a super easy cycle is, aim for some delicious junk food, anticipate the pleasure, then order it online and achieve it in half an hour at your doorstep without any struggle. That is so easy to do that we keep going for it, even though we know it never feels very satisfying because there was no struggle.

Many businesses make money by providing us with easy ways to fulfill this need. Social media is the familiar culprit but also movies, shows and especially video games. Video games even have struggle in their cycle which is why they get addictive because they are more satisfying than other shallow means of fulfilling pursuit. Video games are satisfying without having to take any risks in the real world, and that’s why many young people prefer them over pursuing difficult things in the real world.

We often avoid difficult pursuit loops such as work, studying, creating something, because the struggle is much harder and longer and often the aim is poorly defined.

Two ways to change that is to stop fulfilling this need with easy things for a while and create shorter pursuits in difficult but meaningful areas with clear aims and a definite end point where you can feel like you’ve achieved something.

For example, if you want to learn to draw, instead of setting a goal of drawing daily for half an hour, you might want to create a project where you draw 20 portraits in a week. That way you have a clear aim, a clear deadline and at the end something to hold and feel like you’ve successfully finished a pursuit.

Society

We live in society because it allows all of us to consume far more value than we could have created for ourselves. Humanity has clearly been moving towards more and more cooperation in larger and larger numbers. Despite all the attempts of different groups of humans to not cooperate with each other, we’ve been moving in this direction, because in the end, it is beneficial for humanity.

This should help us understand that we can’t help but live in society. Those who seek to escape society and build a little homestead, forget that they’re still participating in society. Their land rights are protected by society. The tools they use on their homestead were created by society. The only way to truly live without society would be to go to a deserted island without any tools or knowledge, completely naked and then create all the value you need yourself.

If we’re going to want to live in society then we should try to build one we would like to live in. This is where I reject moral nihilism. Morals emerge from this fact that humans are social animals and do best when they live in society. And society is best maintained by living in certain ways and avoiding other ways. We don’t need a supernatural being telling us not to murder and steal. We should want to do that because it’s in all our mutual interest to cooperate.

The rule is that you should behave the way you wish everyone else in society behaved.

If you think that because there’s no god to enforce morals, you’re going to do whatever you want and take what you want and kill anyone who tries to stop you, then imagine living in a society where everyone lives like that. You won’t be able to enjoy yourself in such a society, would you? This kind of thuggish behavior only works in a society where everyone else is sociable and meek. Try to do it in a prison and you get stabbed.

In fact, if humans had tried to live like this from the beginning, we would have never built civilized societies and reached where we are now. To live selfishly and aggressively where each human is on their own, is to live like crocodiles or snakes. They live solitary lives and only meet to mate and don’t raise their children. I don’t think anyone would want to live in a world like that.

As for the question of how to deal with people who just don’t care about mutual benefit, the simple answer is that that’s why we have law and order and the justice system. It’s not like in the past when people believed in god, everyone was moral and there were no criminals. There’s always been criminals and the solution has always been to protect the majority of society from them.

Value Exchange

Value exchange is one of the main reasons to want to live in society. We create value for someone by creating a product or service or selling our time, energy, skills and knowledge. We get money in exchange of this value which we spend in society to get the value we need for ourselves.

Understanding money as this tool that facilitates value exchange is a good way to remove some misconceptions we might have developed about it.

The problem with money is that it is not just a tool for value exchange but also a way to store up value. Stored value is wealth and humans have an instinct to save up value for the future. But this instinct is overindulged when individuals blindly keep storing more and more wealth. No amount of wealth seems enough to feel secure.

There are many other problems with money but I won’t go into all of them here. From the perspective of practical application, we should just learn to think of money in terms of value exchange.

Why are you earning money? What value you really want to consume? What are your true needs and what are wants? Which of your wants are truly yours and which have been programmed into you by advertising? How much value are you creating and how much are you consuming? These questions should help you improve your relationship to money.

Optimize Suffering

I talked about how the three worlds all have inherent suffering within them. We can also divide suffering into necessary and unnecessary kinds of suffering. Some biological suffering is inevitable so we won’t even consider it here. You just have to suck it up and bear it, no matter what.

We’ve been obsessed with comfort and removed a lot of suffering from our lives, much of which was necessary. Physical exertion and movement is one example. On the other hand, we’ve increased a lot of unnecessary suffering in our lives.

Most of this unnecessary suffering comes from our internal world and by believing that the illusory human world is real. Anxiety, for example, often occurs when people take small social issues that are completely socially constructed, and feel like they are a real physical threat. Not doing well in your career and getting mocked by neighbors is not the same as being chased by a lion.

In our search for comfort, we’ve reduced necessary suffering and increased unnecessary suffering. It’s time to reverse the trend.

We should be able to distinguish between necessary and unnecessary suffering. Optimizing suffering means to learn to endure inevitable suffering, learn to seek out and embrace necessary suffering and learn to avoid unnecessary suffering.

Reject Meaning Compensation

Another principle I’ve developed is to reject not just meaning but also various ways we try to replace meaning in our lives. Things like success and productivity often become ways to compensate and fill the hole left by the collapse of meaning in our life.

These compensation techniques often lead to a lot of unnecessary suffering. I would like to focus primarily on our desire to achieve success and be productive all the time. These are interrelated and often go together.

Our stories are often about an underdog achieving great success with great hard work and perseverance and a little bit of luck. These stories are highly motivational but they contain a hidden message.

Even if these stories don’t intend this, what they end up making us feel is that if we’re unhappy then it must be our own fault. If we just work hard and persevere, then we will find success and the implicit message is that then we’ll be happy. This assumption is wrong to begin with, (as proven by all the unhappy successful people) but the corollary to this is that only those who’re successful deserve to be happy.

I can’t help but feel that this is also partly capitalist propaganda. We’re being encouraged to work hard and be endlessly productive. To the point that we are our own wardens. We try to fill every single second of our life with productive activities. But the dark side of this is that people make success their life’s purpose and when they can’t work hard consistently, they blame themselves and slowly move down the negative feedback spiral into depression.

So as a principle, it is better to understand when your desires are genuine and when society is manipulating them to sacrifice you for its own goals. Don’t try to compensate for the loss of meaning by anything. Instead understand that meaning isn’t necessary.

Choose a Better Narrative

One of the results of our predilection for storytelling is that we’ve gotten too used to the most common narrative structure and we see the world through that same lens. I’m talking about the narrative of good vs evil characters in the setting of order vs chaos. If the good guys win, order prevails. If the bad guys win, chaos ensues.

This narrative makes for very enjoyable stories but it is an oversimplification of reality. As a map of the world, it is not very closely aligned with reality. So, it is a mistake to view the real world through this lens.

In reality, there are no purely good or purely evil people. Also, the world does not clearly fluctuate between heterogenous states of order and chaos. Finally, chaos is not as bad as we think it is.

In reality, the universe is driven by chaos or disorder, a.k.a entropy. The universe can’t do anything other than move towards higher disorder. But local pockets of order emerge out of this disorder. They appear because they help increase the overall disorder in the universe. Life borrows order for itself while helping the universe increase disorder.

In the human world, order and chaos are often present simultaneously. If one part of society is ordered, another part can be in chaos. Also, too much order is just as bad as too much chaos. So instead of a clean swing between order and chaos it’s always a complex combination of the two with the fluctuation being between which one dominates.

Similarly, people are a complex mixture of both good and evil. Sometimes they can be very good and sometimes very evil, but mostly they’re somewhere in the middle.

When we see the world via the good vs evil narrative lens, we think the people who are doing things we don’t like must be evil. This creates a hateful and antagonistic culture where different groups are always at war with each other. And because everything is fair in love and war, we are inundated with propaganda, biased narratives, misinformation and poor quality sensemaking.

This is not just bad for society but also bad for individuals in their own lives. Following any distorted maps that don’t align well with reality will always cause you unnecessary suffering.

Beauty in Complexity

There are other narratives in storytelling, though not as popular as the good vs evil one. One such narrative is beauty in complexity.

This is often seen in stories which we find to be more realistic with complex, grey characters. Complexity is a mixture of order and chaos. Beauty is my term for a similar mixture of good and evil in humans. To see the beauty in humans is not about finding the good in them, but about clearly seeing both the good and evil in them. It’s this complexity of humans that makes them beautiful.

Using this narrative lens to view reality is much better. This allows us to engage with people who belong to groups we disagree with. It calms down the sense of panic we feel about the world going to hell. If chaos seems to be increasing, remember that chaos is always present. Look for order and you’ll find it somewhere or another.

When you feel immense hatred for a stranger, try to find the beauty in them. They can’t be all evil, there must be something good in them. And when a public figure fills you with love, look for the evil in them, so you don’t end up following them blindly.

Also, don’t rely simply on the feeling that your side are the good guys. All groups feel that way. Only rarely do we find groups that consider themselves villains. The greatest acts of evil are often done by groups of people convinced they are the good guys. Avoiding the good vs evil narrative helps you avoid falling into this trap.

Iterative Development

The last principle I want to talk about is that of iterative development. Our old systems were created mostly by emergent intelligence, which means that they worked really well at least in the beginning. But because they were faith based, when the environment changed and it was time to update them, humans held on to them because they believed them to be true. This turned these useful systems into ossified dogmatic systems that stopped working and did more harm than good.

The solution to prevent this from happening again is to adopt the principles of iterative development from the software development industry.

Car manufacturers spend years designing a car and then launch it and sell it for decades with superficial updates. Software manufacturers design a minimum viable version of the software quickly and launch it to the public. They use the feedback they get to improve the software and fix bugs. They keep improving and updating it, which allows the software to adapt to the changing hardware environment.

The new systems we develop should also follow this methodology. It doesn’t make sense to build systems that are supposed to work forever into the future. We can’t know how the environment will change in the future and what our needs will be. We can either build faith based systems and slow down our progress so that it happens in violent bursts or we can make our system design iterative from the beginning.

I will not go into my ideas on how to improve many of our systems such as money, politics etc. because those are not necessary for this minimum viable version of my philosophy. What I want to talk about a bit is how to do iterative philosophy development.

Iterative Philosophy Development

I’ve already talked about how to do rational philosophical sensemaking. This is the next step to that. Iterative philosophy means you don’t try to figure out the absolute truth and give final theories about different topics. You use the current knowledge that science has and your current understanding of the world and come up with the best theories you can come up with without getting too attached to them, and without getting bogged down by trying to perfect them. These are provisional theories.

You apply them to your own life and you share them with others so they too can apply it in their life. You take the feedback from your own lived experience and from other users of your philosophy and use it to fix bugs and make improvements to your philosophy.

Your goal is not to argue in such a way so that no professional philosopher can defeat your argument. Your goal is to produce practical application principles that can help people live lives in a better way. And the test of your philosophy is in how much it can help people in the real world. If something works and helps people, then it doesn’t matter whether it is the absolute truth or not. It is close enough to work.

Once we can learn how to do iterative philosophy development, we’ll be able to develop all our other systems and tools in a better way as well. Having the principle of iteration as core to the philosophy will ensure that it never turns into faith based dogma.

Summary

Having reached the end, I want to reflect on the strange way this primer develops. It goes from big picture view of the universe to the human world to psychology and then to self-help. As strange as this progression seems, it is actually a good sign.

You can’t improve your life with superficial tricks. You have to go deeper. And as you go deeper and deeper you end up doing philosophy. You have to understand the world in order to figure out how to live. This is the difference between philosophy or rational sensemaking and self-help. This is not self-help because there are no promises of hope or miraculous life change or success or anything like that.

There is no silver bullet. Life is still going to be hard. Decisions will still be tough. Negativity, sadness, pain, boredom will all be part of life. All we can do is try to live each day in a rational way and enjoy our experience in this universe before we stop existing forever.

We need to begin by accepting that life is ultimately meaningless. But also realizing that this is not such a big problem and is actually a panacea to much of our current problems and issues.

We need to stop relying on meaning and move into a post-faith world. We can still do orientation and even use narratives if we want, but we don’t need to believe in them on faith. If we can learn to do this, we can enter the next stage of human evolution where our systems are iterative and rational.

Then we can finally live up to the humanist ideal of all humans being truly equal. We can create a society where everyone gets at least their basic needs met and maybe even achieve their potential and we all benefit from the value everyone creates.

Instead of trying to earn enough wealth and power so that our descendants will always be able to survive, (which only a handful can do and which ironically increases wealth inequality and makes society unstable and makes the descendants of billionaires a target in a future revolution, not to mention the climate crisis which endangers everyone), we can try to build a society so all our descendants can survive and thrive and live in a sustainable environment.

If I’m pushed to be slightly romantic, one narrative we can attach to this orientation, without believing it to be literally true, is that we are not something separate from the universe that inhabits the universe. We are the universe. And the universe is experiencing itself through us.

Each one of us, through our life, is giving the universe a unique experience.

Take this narrative if it soothes you, just don’t turn it into meaning.