weltanschauung:

i have chased after a thorough worldview from the time i thought about these things. time and again, i’ve been thwarted in this. by the way, by thorough worldview, i mean a personal philosophy comprehensive enough to form the moral basis of all my opinions and actions. why? because i’m convinced that the grown-up world is fraught with moral dilemmas and life-changing experiences that threaten the very principles you claim to stand by. and i want protection from these dangers. my thorough worldview, i imagined, will be the absolute authority by which i stand; it will make my world black and white.

of course, i never achieved that.

maybe it’s because i’m not intelligent enough to formulate such a system. i believe that. but i also suspect that it might be humanly impossible to come to such a conclusive worldview. i think to achieve this, one might have to commit to some very questionable aspects of the worldview. And to do so, you might have to be quite deluded.

(for an illustration, read about how living by a philosophy leads you to do some very questionable things in “How Ayn Rand ruined my childhood“. and to experience this for yourself, test yourself in Battleground God.)

i don’t really know what i’m trying to achieve with this direction-less reflection. but maybe i’m just very tired of fixing my faulty toy. it keeps getting broken because of something i’ve read, or heard, or seen. it doesn’t help that i’m so helpless in the face of rhetoric and bad at standing my ground.

so what if i can’t hold together a flawless worldview? maybe that would make me more open to ideas. i say i believe in pluralism but sometimes, i get so worked up that another person’s view contradicts my own. i don’t know what is right and what is wrong anymore. i don’t know what to believe in.

and despite how this sounds, it’s not that i feel defeated. in fact, i feel that giving up this pursuit might actually free me.

josh wrote this in a very sweet note:
“we are people without labels and we seek, not just for meaning, but for the meaning of meanings.”

i’ve thought very long about this and maybe he thinks me better than i actually am. i don’t think i mean to be someone without labels, it’s just that labels constantly elude me because i could never correctly define myself and my philosophy, being of a weaker mind.

since i’m lost in it anyway, i’ll just embrace liminality.