Since I was 16, I’ve been obsessive about the ‘right’ way to think about and approach life. This is perhaps an obvious statement to make. Doesn’t everyone make it their concern to live and think rightly? This seems to be the case at first glance, if only because almost no one deliberately tries to live wrongly; at best there are those, and plenty of them, who have an almost, but not quite, complete disregard for right or wrong. So-called nihilists, materialists, hedonists, and so on. No doubt all of these figures, in their own way, try to find that which accords best within them, which more or less refuses a cosmological grounding for their acts and thoughts. On the other hand, you have those who more or less ‘accept the way things are’ without any drive to consider this ‘way’ that things ‘are’ to any true depth, and many of them do quite fine for themselves. HS, college, marriage and then voila, a tombstone with some to visit it from time to time. I’m not condemning any of these approaches, it just naturally hasn’t been something I was able to accept. Someone once told me, rather annoyingly at the time but which turns out to have been utterly true, that I insist on ‘always learning my lessons the hard way.’ That is, someone, usually in a position of some kind of authority (supposedly), tells me that this is the case, and therefore I should do such and such. With almost machine-like precision, I tend to say, in my own way, ‘we’ll see about that.’ This either results in me shocking said person when I find a loophole, or they gain a tremendous opportunity to say ‘I told you so.’ Regardless of the ultimate tally, I have, in my adventures and journeys, insofar as they can be called that at this stage, had to construct my own systems of thought, my own philosophical orientations: everything I have or do must be on my own terms, and this includes not merely taking some ideological cliche and running with it, or reading some business advice online and viewing it as gospel. This means that in some sense my successes feel truer, more profound, they have some internal gravitas that others don’t sense. For me, when I win it is some kind of validation of a decades-long or longer attempt to erect a 1/1 philosophy of life—of course, when I fail, it is difficult to not feel absolutely condemned, vain, a moral hack. When one goes it alone one also learns that one is not always a friend, and should not believe everything one thinks. But, after some time, some notches on the belt and many failures, I wish to expand in more concrete terms ‘what it is that I believe,’ and more specifically how I treat my self, my ego, and what I let inform my philosophy of life and what I insist on remaining indifferent to, as a matter of an intuitive principle, a gut feeling which I trust to guide the contours of the thoughts despite not being able to give it a name or sense of reason. This is, when we get really down to it, all that a man has. We could end the article here, but an elaboration has been promised and so it will follow. To lately throw in a suitable epigraph, from a man I hold in high regard, as many others do, and who you will have to source the quote from on your own time, because why not?: ‘Why would you join the Navy when you could be a pirate?’
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