When I feel something is bloated, unnecessary, and can be avoided - I avoid it. A perfect example of this might be the “Introduction” part in books. I hate to write introductions that span pages long, and tend to serve every other purpose than its real one. Keeping this in mind, I can just conclude the purpose of this handbook in a few more lines. This handbook does not (or anyhow intend to) dictate any sort of philosophy you might have presumed. It is just a glance at how I view life and its extensive “properties” through my lenses. Or you can also interpret it this way - a spiral of a teen’s thoughts printed in a few pages. Chapters in this text might not be arranged in the perfect way, and I would ask you to kindly excuse me for that. Also forgive me if I don’t have the perfect way of presenting this document.
Personal Philosophy is an incomplete, but somehow very strong reflection of our ideals. We might not notice it in a significantly different manner - but whenever we express a personal opinion or choice - we are instinctively following our personally crafted philosophy.
When we arrive at this world and start recognising structures, patterns and human culture - a philosophy starts forming in our mind. This is not the kind of “philosophy” you would expect to read in a philosophy book - yet it is exactly the same thing, but in a heavily reduced and personified form. Most philosophers like to romanticize and aggravate simple ideas - to sound more profound and content. I am no critique of anybody or anything, but I personally experienced it and hence I shared it.
Throughout this book, I would like to keep aside any form of spiritual or religious context, and that applies immediately from now. So you can rule out any possibilities of me trying to debate the existence of God in this book. No. Not happening.
More importantly, by “philosophers” you can safely rule out the specific category of them mentioned above. This does not intend disrespect, rather my mere inability to grasp the complexity the above branches of philosophy create or provide.
To understand or draft your personal philosophy, you don’t really need to read a lot of books on philosophy, guidance or anything. Philosophy is a vast, or precisely, extremely vast collection of perfect and imperfect ideas by many wise men forged together. Many of them tend to deep dive into the lives of every other characteristic individual lived, by categorising many under weak sections of text. They mostly try to cover everything. You don’t need that. You only need your personal philosophy. Notice how I emphasized that “your”? That’s my way of saying to be addicted to yourself, your ideals and your morals. That’s your personal philosophy.
No one can better describe or draft your personal philosophy better than you, yourself. Seriously, no one. At the end of the day, you will find yourself to be the only sole dictator of your definition, how you define yourself, and your actions. The way you think about life, the world, your actions and the various processes going on in this abstracted materialistic world - is your own personal philosophy.
Now here comes a likely setback (or is it? Up to you, because by now you should have defined your personal philosophy). Years from now, you might look back at your personal philosophy and be like, “whoa! This seems so childish and inaccurate. Did I really write this?” – maybe I will experience it too. But it does not mean that everything you drafted as your personal philosophy back in the day, were inaccurate or inconsistent. And surprisingly, philosophy has never been “perfect”, “accurate” and “consistent”. There are many such examples of philosophers who have had a change in their mindset and ideals, and even drafted it a multiple number of times, several times in their life. Philosophers tend to contradict their own ideals every now and then. Nothing new.
I was not skeptic about morals until I was met with a (kind of) dilemma:
“If nothingness dominates in the global or the cosmic scale, what abstractions are we chasing after in this materialistic world?”
A wide range of institutions, especially those concerned with the proper upbringing of the younger ones of the human race – lay a great amount of stress on morals. “Proper upbringing”, “moral quotes”, “good and evil”, “success and failure”, etc. As the great Friedrich Nietzsche quoted in his book The Gay Science, “God is Dead” or “Morality is an artificial abstraction created by us mortals, and that must be stripped off to reveal new life methods”. Beautiful, indeed. To live in a world of emotions, abstractions, and various philosophies, one must learn to abide by the social constructs, otherwise the society becomes quite dystopian. However, I feel like we might be stressing a lot too much on these relativistic terms and considering them as absolute constants. What do I mean? Well, let me explain.
We, humans have a peculiar way of educating and exercising upon our progeny to follow social methods, and I feel it is a bit too much — which has previously, and still continues to lead to many deaths (self-destruction or in societal terms – suicide and other kinds of -ide involving different procedures from hatred, jealously, fear, etc.), self-sabotage and depressive ideas. Of course, to uphold (kind of) an utopian society, one must be aware of such social constructs. Being a teenager, I have a pretty concrete example to demonstrate this fact – the education system.
The world demands non-discrimination between caste, creed, sex, tribe, colour, etc. When it comes to educational institutions, practices, or even the industry, we see something quite opposite – ranks, grades, etc. supposedly based on “merit”, excluding the fact of corruption. A student named “C” surpassed a student named “B” in academics. Assuming a general reaction, the guardians of “B” become keen on pressurizing or at least “nudging” him to perform better, enter a competitive spirit, and try to surpass “C”.
Turns out, “B” might be more enthusiastic in fields other than academics, or fields so niche they are unexplainable to the common, including his guardians. It becomes a matter of forced interaction with something at a deeper level, i.e. the academics, which “B” was never ‘very’ interested in, but had to, considering his guardians were keen on being competitive against “C”. They become forced rivals.
I am not going to bring up a lore of “B” surpassing “C” later in the future, earning money or becoming more intellectual - and the reason is the exact topic of the following stanza.
The terms - “good”, “bad” / “evil”, “success”, “failure” are so relative, precious and sensitive, but we keep on using them in casual phrases.
Society: “C” is a good boy because he topped his class. He will surely be a success in the future.
Also society, years later: “B” is a success, he became a millionaire.
What does society try to mean? Aren’t the two terms contradicting?
Think this out yourself. Imagine a purely hypothetical situation – You and your sibling are out to visit your grandparents’ house. You love buns (and hate brownies), while your sibling loves brownies (and hate buns).
Case A: You both got buns for breakfast.
Result: You are satisfied, your sibling is not. For you, it was a good meal. For your sibling, it probably was a bad one.
Case B: You both got brownies for breakfast.
Result: Your sibling is satisfied, you are not. For your sibling, it was a good meal. For you, it probably was a bad one.
Case C: You both got your respective choices..
Result: Both you and your sibling were satisfied, and either of you considered it a good meal.
See how the terms fluctuate? The same meal becomes good and bad, depending on other conditions (extremely important). Let’s see another case.
Your Friend: Studied well, and became a tycoon.
Society: He has achieved success.
You: Studied well, and is a legendary figure in academia and research, earning a fair salary.
Society: Respects you, the ones interested a lot in academia, students, teachers, owe you gratitude and considers you a success. Some money-chasing people do not.
This is a classic example of intersection, but applied to society. The common region of people who respect academia and love money, and also the people only loving money - is the amount of people respecting you.
Another friend: Loves and studies a very niche field, loves to do that all day, earns pretty less just enough to survive daily, and he genuinely loves his life.
Society: (Majority) Failure.
People who genuinely love that field, and hate money:
(Minority) Considers the friend as a success, the wealthy as a failure, and too abstracted.
None of them is wrong. But the society as a whole tends to appreciate only the first, and hesitatingly, the second class. In my first example, the guardians of “B” probably optimized for success as being academically good, grades, and a wealthy income later in life, maybe “B” himself optimized for something different.
I would not even call any kind of criminal practices bad in the sense. Neither are they good. Same for everything -> nothing is absolutely good or bad, success or failure. It all depends on the lenses you view society with. And that lens is metrics. The metrics that follow a general definition of good, bad, success, failure and other morally relativistic terms.
For example:
1) He studied hard in school, worked hard to achieve financial greatness in life, is now a business tycoon, a billionaire and can be considered as a success in his domain.
It's like a function right? With a domain and a range? Exactly.
2) He studied hard in school, worked hard to achieve academic and research status, is now a scholar, and a research partner at the world’s biggest labs, and to him - he is a pure success. He got what he wanted.
3) He always had a great interest in niche computer kernel development work. Always underappreciated, not earning much but his goals were to live his life of kernel development, work with hardware, touch registers and write low-level code, while living a minimalist life. He has achieved that, hence he is a success.
See the metrics we defined this time? They make a statement involving those typical relativistic terms - complete.