Type the words "philosophy is..." into a google search bar and these are the results you get:

What a tragedy for this once noble discipline. How can "the love of wisdom" ever be described as stupid or a waste of time? Why is so much philosophy these days viewed as useless bullshit by the general public? Is philosophy really dead? I certainly don't think it has to be this way.

In Plato's Phaedro, Socrates makes the claim that rather than being dead, philosophy is in fact "a preparation for death." This aphorism is often quoted with the intention of offering philosophy as a guide for living so that the moment of death is taken calmly and heroically. The quote survives with impact because Socrates himself died the most famous death in philosophical history, having been tried on charges of impiety and corrupting the youth (specifically for "failing to acknowledge the gods that the city acknowledges" and "introducing new deities" - well done religious intolerance), then sentenced to die by a majority of his Athenian citizen jurors (a classic example of the tyranny of the majority), and stoically drinking his hemlock-based punishment. Socrates faced his death bravely as a dualist who believed his body got in the way of the philosophical work of his mind, and that his soul would think more clearly in a better afterlife once it was separated from his body. I disagree with all of that reasoning, but I do agree that philosophy is the best preparation for death. Specifically, I've written:

So far, death comes to us all. Given that there is no afterlife, there is nothing to fear in death. Without a body, we can feel no physical pain. Without a body, there can be no mind struggling with the continual turmoil of the battle between life and death. Death marks an end to the possibility of pleasure or happiness though so it is to be avoided as long as these are available to us. When our time comes to die, we will want to look back on a life well lived and not be overwhelmed by regrets or doomed to an eternity of poor remembrance by society. Live well to die well.

In some aboriginal tribes, when a member of the group dies, their body is washed, painted with symbolic designs, sung over, mourned, and then placed on a burial platform. Once the body has decayed, the bones are recovered and distributed to relatives in a small ceremony. After waiting a varying length of time - which may be up to many years - the relatives hand over the bones to ceremonial leaders for them to hold what is called a Hollow Log ceremony. The logs, hollowed out naturally by termites, are found, cleaned, and painted with relevant designs. The bones are cleaned, painted with red ochre, and placed in the log during special dances. Once a series of songs and dances have been completed to celebrate the life of the person who has died, their log is carried and danced into the main public camp and stood upright, where it is left for years like a tombstone with an epitaph in a cemetery.

I like the fact that this ancient precursor to our modern burial rituals takes weeks and then years to complete. I don't have a clear window into the effect this has on the surviving people of the community, but I have to believe this lengthy process has several results. Those still alive must spend more time in contemplation remembering the lives of those that have died. Dying members must feel comforted that they will not be forgotten any time too soon. And all people must be reminded more often that they had better live well to ensure they are thought well of during these long ceremonial burials. These are all good things.

And so, with this short meditation on death, I've come to the end of my essays "concerning me" in the quest to know thyself. I hope they have helped make the case that philosophy is indeed not dead. Philosophies are the way we guide our lives whether we consciously think about them or not, and so they really should be examined more closely if we want our lives to prepare us well for their eventual end. Spread that word among your own community. Remember those who have died. Resolve to live so as to be remembered well.

On that note, I'll be off living well for the next three weeks. I'm going touring to New Zealand to relax, enjoy an awe inspiring landscape, and hopefully find lots of new things to bring to my life and my writing. I'll be back soon with more challenging Socratic questions, but while I'm away, may you rest in peace.

I've come a long way in this blog's quest to know thyself. There's still much to come concerning others, things, places, ideas, and some fun with philosophers, but I'm just about done with posts concerning the self. I've looked in the past (where did I come from?), and the present (where am I?, what am I?). Now it's time to look to the future. Where am I going? As I indicated in the comments of last week's blog post, philosophers don't like to speculate about the unknown. Perhaps the definitive quote about this is this one:

So rather than make predictions about any of the number of directions your or our future could go, I prefer to state all that we really know, that our future holds some life and then death. Beyond that, it's hard to say anything more specific. Rather than stop there in Wittgensteinian silence though, I thought this would be the place to talk about "the meaning of life," a topic that most academic philosophers nowadays regard as taboo or unprofessional. But if you've read my statement of purpose, you know I consider this root of the discipline something that desperately needs to be taken up once again. And so, I've made a modest beginning to come up with some broad aphorisms about life to help guide a future towards happiness and goodness through the use of some philosophical wisdom. Much more will be said in the future in my novels and stories and essays, but here are the first 9 statements that I came up with:

1. Life was hard throughout most of our evolutionary history. Beings that evolved feelings of enjoyment during hard work coped better with this difficulty. This is fortunate because living an examined life, finding happiness, and ensuring the survival of the species is hard work, but we must undertake it. It is good to know we will enjoy it.

2. Positive psychologists find four categories of life goals: 1) work and achievement; 2) relationships and intimacy; 3) spirituality and religion; 4) generativity / legacy leaving. Find the goals that you can best achieve. Find balance among them. Include philosophy in the list of goal number three and use it as a guide to do all of this. Happiness comes from coherence among the three levels of personality traits towards ones life goals. Explore the world. Explore yourself. Find the intersection between your interests, your strengths, and your opportunities to find a fulfilling purpose. Know thyself and strive for life-long happiness.

3. There are six time perspectives you can have on your life: 1) past - positive events; 2) past - negative events; 3) present - hedonism; 4) present - fatalism; 5) future - goal oriented; 6) future - worry oriented. Recognize the benefit of focusing predominantly on 1 and 5 with some 3 for energizing enjoyment. Learn from 2 when it happens. Do not believe in 4; it is irrational. When 6 arises, use 5 to make a plan, and 1 to believe you will achieve it.

4. Balancing safety vs. exploration is regulated by a “thermostat” of your genes x your environment. Stable and enduring feelings of safety come from stable and enduring attachment figures. Parents, then friends, then romantic partners play these roles of attachment figures throughout one's life. Three patterns emerge for finding safety (which leads to exploration): 1) avoidance - too reliant on self; 2) clinging - too reliant on others; 3) secure - just right. Work on your emotional behavior to become a stable and enduring attachment figure for others. Feel safe from your secure attachments. Explore the world to bring more to your life and the lives of others.

5. Happiness can also be understood as the absence of pain – pain of body, confusion, scorn, worry, unfulfilled desire. Avoid pain not by sitting still, but by actively seeking life. Remember the Buddhist mantra while seeking; pain in life is unavoidable, suffering over that pain is a choice. Choose your cognitive appraisals and your focus to stop wallowing in the emotion of suffering.

6. Nurtured childhoods train empathy, reciprocity, cooperation. Stressful childhoods train fending for yourself, watching your back, competition. Both skills are needed in a society where tit-for-tat behavior strategies must lead with cooperation but punish transgressions.

7. Cooperation, subsuming to groups, means not giving in to the instant gratification of the self. Self-control / delayed gratification correlates strongly with personal success. It can be improved with stable, predictable environments, building the mental capacity to control your attention and thoughts, and gaining wisdom about which actions balance the needs of self and society in the short term and the long term.

8. Adversity may be required for growth - it is certainly an opportunity. Do not try to cope with adversity by avoidance, by denying events, or blunting emotions through substance abuse or distraction - the adversity will only return in the long term. You must cope with crises by direct action to fix them, or reappraisal to get your thoughts right. You emerge from introspection when you develop internal consistency / reflective equilibrium. You triumph over adversity when you get your thoughts right.

9. Getting your thoughts right requires critical thinking. It requires rational data over intuition and emotion. It requires less dogma, less authoritarianism, more curiosity, more open-mindedness, more conscientiousness. It requires seeing past cognitive biases such as framing, priming, loss aversion, etc. It requires introspective ability, and being neither over- nor under-confident. Getting your thoughts right is hard work. This is why industriousness in childhood (jobs, chores, sports) is the best predictor of adult mental health. Getting your thoughts right leads to secure high self-esteem, confidence, success at meeting others needs, of bonding with groups, of wanting more cooperation. Coping by avoidance leads to insecurity, vulnerability to further crises, narcissistic facades, an inability to meet group needs, a fear of being left behind, less cooperation, more competition. Secure high self-esteem is bored by or detests low things. Secure high self-esteem admires other great things and studies them to become rich in cultural, social, moral, cognitive, and aspirational capital. It is driven by a desire to know, a love of wisdom, a philosophy. It is not driven by fear, by hope of evasion. In a life filled with secure high self-esteem, more and more becomes interesting and less and less becomes boring. In this world, life is worth living forever.

Do you have a favorite? Do you disagree with any of these? Do you have a candidate for a 10th, 11th, or 12th aphorism? Let me know in the comments below. I'm always looking for ways to hone and expand this Evolutionary Philosophy. I'm always looking for more ways that life can make sense.

A few weeks ago, I attended an aboriginal dance performance called The Seven Sisters. For 90 minutes, seven grandmas (topless if you really want to look very closely) shuffled around the stage while a chorus on the side sang a rhythmic chant and intermittently paused to tell the story of how these women wandered around the desert, found a man, hid from him, and were finally chased by him into the heavens where they became...Pleiades.

When I shared this experience with friends, they generally reacted with, 'how quaint', or 'how boring!' And they were right. While it was interesting to see an ancient mythology story come to life so untouched by our last 10,000 years of scientific discovery, it can really only be treated as a relic. As a nice story.

This is the way I feel about souls.

Usually, I really look forward to writing this philosophical blog post each week. I always learn something new when I do my research for it. So far I've covered my foundational belief statements (my tenets), and begun the search to know thyself by examining where I have come from, where I am, and what I am. These have been filled with fascinating discoveries by the greatest minds of our species - often against great odds, opposed by centuries of dogma, and found in blinding eureka moments after years of labored searching. The story of how we built telescopes, learned about light refraction, teased out the periodic table of elements, calculated the laws of physics, and grew to understand the birth of stars and the actual composition and location of the stars in the Pleiades constellation - now THAT is a story worth reading. And it holds my attention for far longer than 90 minutes. And it is helpful to our knowledge of how to survive.

In the same way that this aboriginal myth is just a story, the story of souls is also just an ancient fabrication. Souls were invented by people longing to be comforted about death. We'd like to believe in them, but there hasn't been a single scientific discovery of anything that would indicate they exist. As I wrote in my section on souls:

There is no basis to believe a soul exists as something separate from the body. Consciousness does not arise before birth, go on after death, or transfer between lives. It can be vastly affected by physical changes to the body. Out of body experiences have been found to originate in brain functions. Psychics and mediums are unproven scams. Do all animals down to the smallest bacteria have souls? If not, given that we have all evolved from single-celled organisms, when did souls first appear? Souls are a comforting concept, but have no basis in reality. It is better to savor the time we have, build the person we can be, feel deep satisfaction and happiness about the shared contributions we make to life’s struggle against death, and rejoice in the luck we have to be a part of it all.

In trying to make sense of the question, "What Am I?", I've discussed our bodies, our minds, and our mind-body interactions. This brought me through discussions of emotion, needs and desires, and personality. So much can be said about these topics from the thousands of man-years of research we've devoted to them. They offer great instruction to lengthen our lives and bring us happiness while we are here. But what can be said about a soul? Nothing but conjecture and wishes. When we ask the question, "What Am I?", can we add to our personal inventory the item of a soul? What for? So religious dreamers can make up rules about what tarnishes or cleanses them? So we can invent imaginary homes for these imaginary entities? So we can quarrel about who has a soul, whose is going where, and why? Without any proof that any of this exists, that's nothing but idle story telling whose purpose has been superseded by actual research into what makes us happy, what makes life live on after we're gone, and what we can do to be remembered and loved. Stories about the origins and destinies of souls are like the primitive stories about the origins and destinies of our stars. And that's the truth about souls - they are quaint relics, and they are boring.

In 2003, Martin Seligman published Authentic Happiness, the book that launched the Positive Psychology movement and sparked a worldwide debate on the nature of real happiness. Rather than looking at happiness as merely an absence of illness or sadness - which was what psychology had effectively done by building lists of neuroses and psychoses since its inception - Seligman and others sought a new way forward by attempting to catalogue the ways humans could be strong. They spent years sifting through 200-plus catalogs of virtue - basically every book of wisdom written by any culture around the world. The research team read through the philosophical works of Aristotle, Plato, and Confucius. They read through religious tomes like the Bible, the Talmud, the Koran, and the Upanishads. They considered spiritual speculations from the likes of Aquinas, Augustine, Buddha, Jesus, Muhammed, and Lao Tze. And they even considered modern guides like Ben Franklin's Poor Richard's Almanack. What they came up with after much analysis and consideration was a list of 24 strengths in 6 general categories. Seligman and his team were quick to point out that this list was not final, but just a good starting point for a new conversation about what elements give someone strength to be happy in this world. These are generally universal across cultures and time, although certainly emphasized or defined slightly differently in different places. To me, they make another excellent way to look at your personality - as an inventory of the character strengths you have developed. Let's take a quick look at the list.

1. Wisdom / Knowledge: 1) Curiosity; 2) Love of Learning; 3) Judgment; 4) Ingenuity; 5) Emotional Intelligence; 6) Perspective
2. Courage: 7) Valor; 8) Perseverance; 9) Integrity
3. Humanity: 10) Kindness; 11) Loving
4. Justice: 12) Citizenship; 13) Fairness; 14) Leadership
5. Temperance: 15) Self-Control; 16) Prudence; 17) Humility
6. Transcendence: 18) Appreciation of Beauty / Excellence; 19) Gratitude; 20) Hope; 21) Spirituality / Philosophy; 22) Forgiveness; 23) Humor; 24) Zest

As I said, in my book,

We are not born with these strengths, but we are born able to learn them and we feel happy when we do. Know your strengths. Build them.

This is a long list that undoubtedly sounds great, but in reality washes over us all too easily. You could really spend an entire life contemplating these and working on them. So why don't we try that? If you really want to concentrate on this, take a page from religion and add these to your very own ritual calendar. With 30 total elements, this would make a great list to add to each day of the month. Day 1 - Wisdom / Knowledge. Day 2 - Curiosity. Day 3 - Love of Learning. And so on. If you thought about one of these strengths every day and how you could be better at building that one, in just one year you would repeat this exercise 12 times for each of the elements. Do you think your life would be better if you took a few minutes every day to consider one of these? What further insights might you make as you repeated this exercise through the years. I think I will give this a try.

I won't say more about each of these strengths for now as I am actually planning to try writing a series of short stories with each one of these as its central theme. I expect this writing project to take a few years with a new short story coming out every month or two. I'll probably sell electronic copies of these for 99 cents, so if you want to be notified whenever these come out, be sure to put yourself on my email list. Until then, stay strong! Next week I'll be leaving personality behind and branching off into an entirely new topic.

For the last few weeks, I've been discussing the three levels of personality:

1. Basic Traits / The Big Five (OCEAN) - Openness to new experiences, Conscientiousness, Extroversion, Agreeableness, Neuroticism
2. Characteristic Adaptations - personal goals, defense mechanisms, values, beliefs, life stage concerns
3. Life Story - past, present, and future woven into a vitalizing myth

I talked about how our basic traits give us tendencies for encountering the world, and how our characteristic adaptations describe how we define that world as good and bad and take actions that reflect those definitions. For the last level, we all grow and change in this world and encounter new environments all the time. The path that we have taken, the place we reside, and our plans for the future, all serve to build the elements of the story we tell ourselves about our own lives. For some people, they are the hero in their story - overcoming or building upon their past to sit in a place where they can launch their glorious future. For others, the villains of their past have turned their story into a hopeless tragedy, or maybe a never-ending comedy of errors. While still others lack any imagination at all about what kinds of stories they can create and end up wandering the world lost or settling for the first simple story they come upon.

What story do you want your life to tell? I now write stories for a living (available here!) and do the best I can to lead a life worth reading. Rather than spout off about any of this though while my own story is so unfinished, I thought it would be great to share some insights from a person who has not only lead a long and amazing life, but who has studied other famous lives and written extensively about them in award-winning biographies. Take a few minutes to listen to the TED talk below from historian Doris Kearns Goodwin. It's an amazing feast of information filled with stories of play and work and family and Lincoln and LBJ and love and loss and ambition and failure and baseball and storytelling. Oh and there's even some funny jokes from this distinguished lady about pissing and shitting and grumpy old Brits. Enjoy! And then see if you can't weave some elements of her helpful stories into your own heroic life.