I’ve seen other people write about their personal philosophies, and I thought it would be fun to write mine down too. I don’t have a grand unifying theory of life, and I don’t really think it’s possible to have one (which I guess is a philosophical statement on its own). Anyhow, here’s a collection of loosely held beliefs and values that guide me.
No single philosophy works when taken whole. Every sufficiently simple system contains insight and overreach in equal measure. What follows isn’t a doctrine or an optimization strategy; it’s a working description of how I move through the world, shaped by uncertainty, beauty, and the fact that this all ends.
Beauty matters. Not in the form of ornament, luxury, or art objects curated for consumption, but as something emergent and real: awe in nature, intimacy with another person, clarity after confusion, looking back on the great things you’ve built and gleaming with pride, presence in a fleeting moment. Real beauty is nourishment, but if it’s hollow, performative, or abstracted it doesn’t feed you.
Subjectivity is unavoidable. It’s impossible to escape your own perspective. Whether there is an objective reality underneath it all is unknowable. Act accordingly. Treat subjectivity not as a flaw to be corrected, but as the medium through which everything meaningful arrives. Your inner life is yours to shape and account for, and its effects ripple outward.
The moment is all you ever touch. Don’t waste it pretending you’ll live later.
Happiness = joy + satisfaction. Satisfaction = outcomes / expectations. Inflate expectations and even good outcomes feel like failure; adjust them thoughtfully and ordinary moments can become miraculous. And don’t forget to optimize for joy! The best things in life are free.
The universe does not care about morality, yet it’s what makes us human. Ethics are chosen, enacted, and sustained locally, between people who can feel harm and care. Any moral system that forgets the individual in favor of abstraction has already failed: Metrics that become targets rot and rules that can’t bend break people.
Think globally, act locally. The world is a big place, and it’s easy to feel small and powerless. Focus on the people around you, the community you’re part of, and the actions you can take that align with your values.
Free will is unresolved. But you still experience choice, intention, regret, and responsibility. There’s no alternative to living as though your actions matter.
The stars are indifferent to astronomy. Science is about identifying models that work: patterns, compressed experience, and predicted behavior within the limits of human cognition. Mathematics discovers relationships inside invented systems. But conflating usefulness with truth is a category error. Certainty is seductive and usually false, intellectual humility is harder and more honest.
Consciousness is the mystery. How strange and wonderful is the fact that anything feels like anything at all. Sensations arise, beauty appears, pain intrudes; becoming numb to that is the real tragedy. A worldview that treats experience as incidental has missed the point.
Existence is the miracle. The prospect of non-existence cuts deeper than any abstract argument can resolve. Wanting an afterlife is a refusal to casually discard the value of experience. The real task is to live in such a way that, when the end approaches, fear loosens its grip.
Life is music. There is no guaranteed meaning, no built-in purpose, and no final explanation that makes everything click. The way to face this strange trip is with laughter in our hearts, and to listen to the music that is life.
Each other is all we’ve got.