Think while enjoyable
A Flash Philosophy Assignment
This is a flash philosophy essay, written in 15 minutes. I’ve fixed the grammar and added some footnotes. Not sure how much sense it makes outside of the context it’s written in.
Posted it here because it captures some themes from meaningness.com in a short bit of text. I can highly recommend reading more over at meaningness.com.
The world is beautiful. Nothing makes sense when we truly dig down.1 Yet, we can make it make sense to a degree that gives us a profound set of meaningful ways to play with it.2
We are animals. Most animals move through the world without concepts. They just sense, act and play.
We have cognition to play with, but it's not the fundament of reality. If we can't make sense of things, that's okay. We don't need advanced cognition to breathe, eat or sleep. Letting go of control is more about calming the monkey than enlightening the spirit.
We can do wonderful things with our cognition, as long as we don't get too attached to it. It's a great tool that can be adapted to many situations. Failing to understand a situation is fine, you can always try again later.
Nihilism is overrated. Meaning is everywhere.3
I want to take care of myself and conceptualise in beautiful and joyful ways. I want to go into a flow of open-ended curiosity, joyfully doing things that benefit myself and others.
I don't need to be on a grand mission, pushing myself to conform to societal norms. I can work to become the best version of myself and improve the world a bit at a time.
Part of me wants to embrace radical moves. I just don't want to force grand narratives around them. Narratives are cognition - wonderful as long as you don't take them too seriously.
P.S: I wrote this short essay as part of the “Discovering Wisdom” experiment, where 4 people including Peter Limberg and me set out to explore philosophical guidance.
The experiment is now over, and I learned a lot.
During the experiment, I’ve offered philosophical guidance to people. The sessions I’ve had this far have been great! There are some open slots, please book a session if you’re interested!
Please also recommend philosophical guidance to your influencer friends, their hamsters, and other entities that might or mightn’t be interested.
Everything is fuzzy around the edges, more complicated than you thought, and hard to define in weird and varied ways.
We make the world easier to interact with. A huge part of civilization is making reality conform to conceptual categories. We put things in boxes, standardize qualities, and categorize things and beings.
Most religions are built on two lies:
There are special, transcendent meanings
Ordinary meanings don’t count
Accepting 2 while rejecting 1 leads to nihilism. Rejecting both leads to freedom.