Boys Sword Fighting

[This post is part of a series called Choose Your Life Purposes. If the issues addressed in these posts interest you, please consider becoming an Existential Wellness Coach. To learn more about our Existential Wellness Coach Certificate Program, please visit here. To preorder Choose Your Life Purposes, please visit here.]

The idea that you get to choose your life purposes can be the basis of a philosophy of life that will serve you beautifully. That philosophy has its roots in many soils, among them existentialism, stoicism, language analysis, deconstructive postmodernism, philosophy of science, and social psychology. It has proud antecedents!

When you acquaint yourself with the difference between life purpose and life purposes, with the value of self-authorship and self-obligation, and with the other ideas I’m presenting, I think that you will find yourself calmed by your new understanding and clear about how to proceed with life.

You will have the experience of his life mattering, even if the universe is indifferent, even if life’s obstacles are relentless and enduring, and even if your own personality is an obstacle. You will have what you may have been looking for your whole life: an actual philosophy of life. Excellent!

One Saturday morning I am writing in a small neighborhood park in Paris. The park is full. On a nearby bench, a woman is angry with a man. He tries to mollify her. On the next bench sit a middle-aged couple who have no need to say anything.

Near me are two old women, one sprightlier than the other and annoyed at her friend’s decrepitude. Outside the park’s swinging gates a woman holding an infant is begging. Around me, a dozen boys are sword-fighting. This is our species. This is life: concrete, real, and various.

You have seen a lot of life already and you can decide for yourself how life works. You probably already knew all about life when you were five or six, even as your head began to be filled with commercials on television, commercials at church, commercials at the family dinner table.

You probably knew it all back then. But then life confused you. That’s what living does. Now you can stand up, clear-eyed and clear-headed, and embrace a grown-up philosophy of life. It is a philosophy of life that is short on wishful thinking about the beneficence of the universe, about our chances in the afterlife, about the goodness of our fellow man, or about how easy it will be to fulfil our self-obligations. It is short on all that—meaning, it is real.

Each day we decide what matters to us. Each day we figure out how to deal with life. Our life is our project and we strive to rise to the occasion. This is an ambitious philosophy that demands that human beings try. It asks them to make use of the freedom they possess, look life in the eye, and stand tall as an advocate for—and as an example of—human dignity. That’s you, yes?

It argues that life relentlessly pairs tremendous ordinariness with tremendous difficulty. In the face of all that, human beings can nevertheless adopt an indomitable attitude. This is not really to most people’s taste. It makes work for them; it pesters them to be moral; it demands that they articulate their life purposes and that they actually live them. That is a lot!

But it is also beautiful. It is a way of life that encourages the best in you. It matches the high-bar vision you have of yourself as an instrumental, creative, ethical person who thinks for himself, rejects humbug, and puts the world on his shoulders. A philosophy of this sort may genuinely serve you. Wouldn’t that be something?

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This Post is republished on Medium.

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