Values

I'm neither hard nor easy to classify, relative to my beliefs. What's challenging is framing those beliefs in a way that observes the nuance that too often gets stripped from the familiar labels we see in the world. It'd be easy to list bullets like "conservative" or "progressive," "atheist" or "believer," and let the unspoken meaning loaded into every such bullet to paint a picture that says "I am in this box and not in that one."

But I don't think easy boxes are honest boxes.

The question Whom am I? is also a way of asking What do I believe? One way to answer the belief question is to start with the end in mind: What is the point of it all?

To that end, I aspire to be a contented and healthy man who, on his 80th birthday, can look himself in the mirror without enduring the bitter sting of regret. That's it. That's my life goal: To live a life that fails to generate a distracting amount of regret.

Philosophy – the love, and study, of wisdom – takes many forms. Classic philosophy, which focuses on metaphysics, ontology, epistemology, and related core topics, really is a catch-all for how individuals choose to engage with the broader world. The discipline of ethics addresses what we owe to ourselves and to other people. Teleology explores our final ends: what makes us "fit for purpose" in a complex, changing world and what markers we may count as success in life.

Let's explore these four dimensions of philosophy, and what I think matters for each. I present 10 maxims for each dimension; taken together, they outline my value system and my way of finding my place in the modern world while I'm still on the sunny side of the cemetery lawn.

How We Engage the World

What are the intellectual, emotional, and social mindsets we need to thrive in the 21st century?

1. Cultivate audacious serenity. Never let your emotions win, and never let the bastards get you down. Sometimes, being calm is hard – but it's always a choice worth making. Don't let the algorithm get your blood pressure up or sap your limited store of attention!
2. Nurture insatiable curiosity. Never stop asking why, even when the question carries a price. Only by drilling deep into chains of causality can you start to see the patterns that drive the universe. A "five why's" exercise often brings clarity when all other explanations fail.
3. Seek the transcendent. I believe the God of the Nicene Creed. Humans seem to be hard-wired to need a transcendent Other to fully supply their meaning, and perhaps there's a reason for this beyond mere accidents of evolution. For me, this meaning comes from taking seriously my heritage in the Roman Catholic Church. Prayer and meditation in a Medieval contemplative tradition helps keep me grounded and aware that I, myself, am actually not God.
4. Name the tiny dragons of chaos. Taxonomy and typology are twin disciplines that deal with complex ideas: how they assemble, how they can be taken apart, and how they can be reconstructed in new ways. Sometimes, when something is proving especially vexing, stripping it into its constituent parts to find the real problem – to name the thing – and helps tame chaos by helping you to reassemble it in a healthier way.
5. Root in a specific place, culture, and belief system. A "rootless cosmopolitan" – a citizen of the world, not constrained by family or traditions or a faith – thinks he or she has evolved beyond the parochial sentimentality of church or town. But the truth is, cosmopolitans simply inhale the exhaust fumes of their birth culture while mistakingly believing that their breaths are their own. You cannot thrive unless you come from somewhere. You cannot thrive unless you embrace your home culture and use it as a frame of reference in a complex world – even if you find aspects of your home culture to be distasteful. You cannot thrive unless you believe in a set of maxims that stipulate the First Principles that cannot be adduced from science or intuition alone.
6. Consume information scientifically. Use critical reasoning and logic to assess arguments and to interrogate new information. Embrace statistics and evidence; be wary of compromised motivation. Trust facts you can verify, and not the opinions of the herd. Beware of gnostic claims that lead to conspiratorial bunny-holes where only the Elect – the people who "did my research" – can see "the truth that they don't want you to know." (Especially if "they" are TheJews™.)
7. Question tidy meta-narratives. If your all-encompassing theory of the world can be distilled into one or more bumper-sticker slogans, the invocation of which serve as a talisman against criticism, odds are good that you're not dealing with facts or genuine beliefs, but rather with religion or gnostic sorcery.
8. Contend humbly with complexity. The world is more complex than anyone can apprehend. Remain open, therefore, to the possibility that there's always something new to learn – that you can be wrong, or at least imperfectly right.
9. Repair Chesterton’s fence. Sometimes "things are" for a reason. Before you blow up that reason, seek to understand it first. Never make a change unless you have deeply contented with why things are as they are.
10. Leave the commons better than you found it. Plenty of spaces aren't owned by anyone but are, rather, spaces for us all. Never take more than you need from the commons, and don't leave a mess on the communal lawn. Or on the comments section.

What We Owe to Others

Every person is an "I" – a subject, in a world of objects. We owe fellow subjects certain considerations that we don't extend to mere objects.

1. Respect the personhood of every human. The fundamental unit of respect is the individual, not the group. If we treat each person with dignity, then all people are treated with dignity, and the challenges of group associations thereby lessen.
2. Model the virtues that command respect. The Golden Rule invites us to "do onto others as you would have them do onto you." Which is good, as far as it goes. But it's probably better to "be the person you would also have others be," and the pathway for making this happen consist in the virtues as conceived by the Ancient Greeks, Romans, and Christians. Doing and being aren't the same thing, after all.
3. Assume positive intent but assess conduct impartially. Never assume bad faith, but don't let this bias color a fair reading of what a person actually does. It's possible to be both charitable and clear-eyed.
4. Manage expectations honestly. When you expect some behavior of others, or when others expect some behavior of you, be up front about whether you're willing to play the game using an agreed-upon set of rules.
5. Play the infinite game with dignity. Everything we do in life is a game, in the sense that it's a chance to come together, negotiate rules, and find a pathway to success. Think of small children who start playing together as toddlers, then "discover" more meaningful and complex forms of play as they grow older. As adults we don't think of what we do as "play" but it is: nested layers of games, culminating in a well-lived life. When you play this game with others, seek to be the kind of person who gets tapped on the shoulder to play again.
6. Demand just competence hierarchies. Every domain of our lives is filled with different groups of people structured in both horizontal and vertical networks. In a vertical network, authority flows top-to-bottom and bottom-to-top. Each level of the hierarchy must be honest, committed to justice, and fit for purpose; it's up to each of us to "make it so."
7. Trust processes before princes. All things being equal, it's better to live in a regime where the rules are established in law and applied equally, than to live in a regime where the will of a favored leader trumps the law. A just society is one governed by well-developed, fairly applied rules rather than by the grace of the elites.
8. Stand first against the wall. Life is sometimes hard. When injustice rears its head, we owe it to our neighbor to be the first to stand with them when the soldiers come, lest no one be left when the soldiers come for us. Niemöller's poem, and all that.
9. Answer the 2 a.m. distress call. Be the human who responds to the needs of others even when it's inconvenient. Especially if you think that you, yourself, might eventually need help at 2 a.m.
10. Manage people as if they’re cats. When a cat's behavior proves vexing, yelling at it doesn't help – all you get is a scared cat that will lash out at you. Rather, changing either the cat's incentives or its environment is usually sufficient to change the behavior in a calm and orderly way. So also with people.

What We Owe to Ourselves

Certain practices make our lives easier and richer.

1. Touch the hunter-gatherer’s grass. No matter how advanced our technology or complex or civilization, we are hard-wired to live in small bands of villages in a wilderness setting. We might not be able to return to the savannah or the forest, but we can adapt our technology and our daily practices to at least respect (rather than ignore or oppose) our default biology.
2. Master a complex, embodied discipline. Learn how to do something physically demanding, because this experience helps you to understand the value of work and the care of your own body. Stuff like martial arts, or piano, or dance – all of this teaches you the limits and the capabilities of your meat suit, and also helps keep it in working order.
3. Maintain a pleasing, healthful comportment. Be reasonably fit, dress reasonably well, and groom yourself with reasonable care. You don't need to be a supermodel to be attractive, and being attractive pays dividends both socially and in terms of your physical and mental health.
4. Favor experience over consumption. When faced with the choice of doing something versus buying something, always choose the memory over the memento.
5. Read the room and calibrate accordingly. There's no value in being just another face in the crowd, but nevertheless there's some value in being a face that's not radically dissimilar from the crowd. Any zebra surrounded by hungry lions understands this. Be aware of trends and consensus; you need not always adhere to them, but being intentional where you conform and where you resist can prove strategically useful.
6. Speak truthfully to the face in the mirror. You can lie to others but you cannot lie to yourself. Self-deception is the most harmful of all the forms of deception known to mankind.
7. Resolve stressors expeditiously. Stress is both manageable and avoidable. When something causes stress, identify its root cause and then fix the problem. Both physically and emotionally, living with avoidable stress proves increasingly harmful the longer it's unresolved.
8. Resist reveling in your rut. Too many people sink to a tolerable level of mediocrity then invent reasons why it's safest to stay there. This trend is most acute with people inclined to blame their self-diagnosed "neurodivergence" for their stasis instead of addressing the external factors that almost always are within their power to control. Never be the person who takes pride in being a victim; victimhood is often a self-fulfilling prophecy.
9. Avoid drowning in a pool of sunk costs. Bad choices are inevitable but there's no virtue in doubling down on failure just because you've already paid part of the invoice. Sometimes taking the loss and moving on is better than paying a steeper price later merely to protect one's pride.
10. Hunt with several different wolf packs. Don't be the person who goes "Bowling Alone." Find multiple, non-overlapping friend groups – ideally, groups with different mixes of ages, sexes, races, and perspectives about politics and religion. Echo chambers and homogenous groups are a recipe for closed minds, closed hearts, and withered souls.

How We Succeed

There's an old Klingon proverb: Revenge is a dish best served cold. But cold dishes don't make for a memorable funeral luncheon. Instead of living to win, recognize that winning is living the kind of life that draws a large crowd of real mourners to your funeral.

1. Embrace the wisdom of those who came before. Life is hard. People have figured some things out. Your own life is easier when you embrace their lessons. So, read books and talk to the elderly and understand that what's old isn't necessarily what's outdated.
2. Ignore the judgment of those yet to come. People who seek the approbation of "history" are trusting the judgment of humans who won't walk the planet until long after they're dead. Usually this concern is more political than practical, or a sign of cowardice when faced with big choices. You cannot predict the future, so how can you conform your life to it?
3. Choose the good you discern and make a habit of it. Find something meaningful – and find it carefully and vocationally. Then commit to realizing that meaning routinely. Be a change agent about something that arouses your passion and brings something good into the world.
4. Do hard things that matter, and do them as best as you can. Striving to accomplish difficult goals sometimes leads to failure, but it's the trying and not the succeeding that makes us better people. Comfort and half-heartedness make for a calmer Friday night, but they also make for a smaller person at the dusk of one's final Friday.
5. Prop open the right number of doors. Choice is hard. It's a delicate balance between keeping so many options open you don't make real progress in life, versus closing so many doors that your number of realistic options diminishes and your life is smaller because of it. An old proverb counsels us to know when to fish and when to cut bait. A wise person also knows when to pick a particular lake and when to write it off their fishing-hole list.
6. Become the human that animals seek for comfort. If animals fear you, you're doing it wrong. Build relationships with a dog or a horse or a cat – a relationship where the animal is happy to be in your company and deliberately seeks you out when it's injured or distressed. A person who is kind to animals is, by and large, the same type of person who is kind to fellow human animals.
7. Keep good records. Take pictures. Maintain a journal. Write a blog. Few things are as tragic as watching a person with dementia, who had lived a rich life, struggle because he or she lacked the aids to memory to nourish them when their brains eventually worked against them.
8. Expect to suffer and be grateful for those moments when you don’t. All life is suffering – a struggle to be happy and healthy and adequately provisioned with the necessities. If you have moments when you're not suffering, treasure them, and share with them others. Happiness and contentment are not the default, nor should you expect that they be.
9. Contribute less suffering to the world than you remove from it. We all contend with the messy complexity of life in complex societies. We cannot help but to add in some way to the sufferings of different people over the years. Yet a milestone of success is to do more, on balance, to reduce the suffering of others than you've done to cause it.
10. Let your unique melody echo through eternity. Lots of people – especially the rich and famous – are eager to leave a name for History. But history forgets names; how many conquering kings of antiquity have been lost even to historians and archaeologists? A better way to leave a legacy is to be the kind of person who has changed the life of others for the better; even if your name is lost, your fingerprint – like the ripple of a stone upon a pond – will change the course of history. And that's no small thing.