A single life philosophy is pure fiction

Today’s WordPress.com prompt asks: What’s a personal mantra or philosophy you live by?

I think that for most of us, our outlook on life, our philosophy, and the way we present ourselves in the world is shaped by all of our life experiences up to the point at which we’d be writing this post. There might also be hidden philosophies shaped by those experiences—hidden in the sense that we don’t even know what they are, we don’t even know they’re having an effect on us, and we don’t even realise that it actually is a philosophy we hold somewhere deep down in our subconscious.

So, I don’t think this question is answerable. There might be people who go through life trying to say, “Oh, I’m going to be this way or that way,” but in their everyday interactions, they probably fall short of any of the mantras or philosophies they claim to hold.

This is going to sound a little bit insulting to some people, but when someone claims they live their life by a single, simple philosophy, my question is: How do they know that they’re succeeding? How do they know that’s actually how they’re showing up for people? Do they conduct exit interviews with the people they encounter in their lives?

Does their philosophy ever encounter a situation that doesn’t fit tidily into what that phrase represents?

If you say, “Do unto others only as you would have them do unto you,” but you encounter somebody whose immediate goal is simply to wipe you out, and your stance is, “Well, I don’t want to kill anybody”—what then? If you don’t fight back and kill them, they’re going to kill you. How does that fit into your “do unto others” philosophy?

When a person’s simple philosophy collides with a messy, real-world situation, it could be an edge case—or it could just be a new, ongoing reality based on where they’ve now chosen to live.
What people actually do in those moments is they punt. They make shit up. They modify the philosophy in subtle ways that they think still align with it, but in reality, that modification shifts it completely into a new space. I don’t think they abandon the philosophy outright; I think they simply convince themselves that they still followed it somehow.

The actual philosophy, in the moment when people encounter situations that don’t fit neatly into their tagline, is how they actually see the world. They are adapting in the moment, yes, but whatever they adapt to reveals how they truly see things. That is the true person coming out.

Aspirational Tagline != Operational Reality Under Stress

Take a extreme example: I have never been in a war zone. I don’t know what it is like to be in a war zone. I can’t imagine being a child growing up in a war zone, and I can’t imagine what would shape their philosophy and how they see the world. Do they see the world as fair? Do they see the world as dog-eat-dog?

How could you go up to that child and say, “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you”? How could you go up to that child and say, “You need to live a life of non-violence”? How could you go to that child and say, “Life is what you make of it, and you should learn to make lemonade from lemons”?

That sounds like utter bullshit to a child who is starving, who has maybe had to defend themselves by killing another person because they want to live. Platitudes like that are luxuries of safety.

I’m not sure who originally said it—it is often attributed to Steve Jobs or Marc Andreessen—but I’d like to think that I’m the kind of person who has strong opinions, loosely held.
Most of my attempts at framing a worldview are based on ideas that stuck with me from science fiction:

• Spock: “The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few.”
• Spock: “Nothing unreal exists.”
• Buckaroo Banzai: “No matter where you go, there you are.”
• Yoda: “Fear leads to anger, and anger leads to hatred, and hatred leads to suffering.”

Those kinds of philosophies don’t really give you pre-packaged answers, but they do force you to think critically about the questions.

This daily prompt really is impossible to answer with a single slogan, and I don’t think anyone can truly and honestly say they know how to answer it that way. Real life isn’t a collection of bumper stickers; it’s an ongoing, messy process of asking the right questions when the neat rules fall apart.