2025-01-09
Throughout my journey, into what I think is living the best possible life I can live on a given moment, I have arrived at an ideology that's a mix of Stoic, Socratic, and Aristotelian philosophies, which can be summarized with:
- Know yourself.
- Master yourself and develop your emotional and intellectual discipline.
- Develop a discipline that is aligned to who you really are.
And as of this moment, it still works for me. To be specific, it works for me because I am a heavily introspective person and I do not rely too much on socialization to validate who I am or who I want to be. It works because I think I have attained a type of mindset that frees me from the expectations of other people because beyond the border of seeking external validation, is where you realize that you can just become who you want to be.
So I always think that knowing yourself: your values, your principles, all things that are important to you, and the honest knowledge of why they are important to you, is the main prerequisite of moving forward. Self-knowledge is the door towards freedom, which requires vigorous exercise of introspection, removing yourself from your ego, tirelessly keeping your biases in check, and keeping yourself accountable for everything you discover about yourself. It means taking action to what has been left unresolved that is the result of your own self-delusion and taking responsibility in setting things right. What is right in this case is always what is just, and what is just will never always be in your favor so you must be able to set yourself aside and prioritize fairness as the situation requires it.
But I also recognize that to be able to arrive to this mindset, I know that my background as a child who grew up in a lower-middle class household and got good education, has everything that made me who I am today. My mindset of what it is to live a good life, when prescribed as a way to live, will not only make my prescription limiting but also narcissistic. Every person does have a different definition or aspiration of what a good life is. Every person has a different purpose in life, whether or not it is a principle they closely follow or a concept that is entirely foreign to them. There is no single answer to what makes a good life worth living.
I guess this inquiry has been propagating inside my mind for a while now because of how it resists non-definition in the scale of universality. In attempting to think about what it truly means to be human, I always get a nagging sensation that there is no fair evaluation on determining a universal answer. In the same way that there is no universal answer on how to live. It feels like we are all given a choice to subscribe to any school of thought (or even create our own way of life) and die on that hill. There is no objective satisfaction in finding the right answer because the right answer will always be anything as long as you are willing to die for it. Perhaps this is where confidence in being unapologetic to your beliefs come from. You know who you are so you stand by what you believe in, regardless of its truth value or rationality, and live a life according to it.
With this, there is no insecurity of being wrong. There is no shame in speaking up. Because what you made for yourself is a kind of truth that no one will be able to take away from you because you become your own creator.
At the same time, this is the very problem of our differences. We believe too much in ourselves. It is baffling how two different approaches with one's ego: first is removing yourself from it, second is making your ego your own self, lead to the same mythmaking of one's self. Both end up in a type of confidence that speaks their own truth but is only different in the type of worldview that it tries to express: the objective world or the inner world. On one hand, you have the "egoless" man, while on the other, you have the "narcissistic" man. Both exist on the same line but are polar opposites of one another.
The egoless man always argues about the world as it is because he is always removed from it. The narcissistic man always argues about himself and how the world must meet his needs. In my head, they form a deadlock that is too difficult to untangle because I have this instinct to resolve every conflict that involves polar opposites. In my head, there should always be a way, even if it can only happen as an abstract concept, to sublimate these elements. I am compelled by reasoning itself to find a solution to this problem that I made myself for no reason.
This would take me weeks.