How to be Kedar

the real fear of death isn’t just pain or uncertainty – it’s realizing with absolute terror that you haven’t accomplished your mission in life.

being able to help someone you love, but not having it in your heart to help him – that is the absolute worst kind of pain.

if you think that you are happy, and you are trying to be more happy, you are really not happy to begin with.

perfect abstraction is a distraction from practical action.

if you feel like you have something to say, but don’t know what to say, it’s best to just sit in silence.

if you have nothing good happening in your life, don’t feel bad; feel good because you have nothing bad happening in your life.

would I rather have the wisdom of an old man, or the mirth of a young child?

why not have both?

look around you. absorb it all. say to yourself, “this is where I am.”

what tone of voice did you use? did you sound resigned? melancholy? proud? bored? angry?

what seems better might be worse than what you had before.

I touched upon something very deep in my last post. I have a deep need to feel like I should exist.

Having observed that I do exist (cogito ergo sum), the first question arises, “Why do I exist?”

I have also said, I feel in several posts in the past, that what does happen should happen. This assumption is deterministic; it sidesteps free will. The state of mind that is consistent with this idea ultimately does not question why he exists. He merely accepts that he should exist, because he does exist. He has peace of mind.

the answer is not that there is no purpose, or that we create our own purpose (nihilism and existentialism). if we use the teleological argument, then a thing should fulfill its purpose. the idea of duty and reason are intimately related. so if it stands true that, ‘what does happen, should happen,’ then a thing is always fulfilling its purpose (it is always doing what it should, which is to fulfill its purpose). and what can be said of purpose? purpose is that the reason why something must happen is that it does happen. this seems like a frivolous tautology, but I do not mean it to be so. we believe that the reason why is separate or behind the thing. for instance, we say that the reason why a ball falls is gravity. what I am saying is that the reason why is equivalent to the thing. the reason why the ball falls to the ground is because it does. yes, gravity is a description of how the ball falls. but it is not the purpose, or the reason why, the ball falls. another formulation is saying that the reason why the ball falls due to gravity, assuming that it is the case, is that is what it does.

okay, let me get back to the point. I was getting a little side-tracked there. a lot of people feel anomie (pointlessness of existence); myself included. but if we conclude, as I have done, that the reason for existence is that existence ‘exists’ (a point which I believe we can unanimously conclude), then there is no loss of purpose at all. it is merely a redefinition; a confusing one at that, if you think about it for long enough.

but there are a lot of unanswered questions. these questions deal with free will (mostly). this is the question. what should I do? it is not satisfying to say that I should do anything and that is my purpose. that seems like a return to aimlessness, and the anomie that I am wanting to avoid.

due to these complications, an entirely new philosophy is fleshed out. it is a philosophy of ‘personhood’.

you can learn more in a minute than what you tried to learn in months.