The Philosophy of Everything 2e — Foreword

Life is a sandcastle. Every adult knows this. Most of us pretend we do not, because the pretending is easier than the knowing. We build the castle anyway. We decorate it. We argue with our neighbours about whose tower is taller. Then a wave comes, the kind that always comes, and we look at the wet sand and feel surprised. We should not feel surprised. We have known about the waves all along. We just preferred not to think about them.

Life is a sandcastle. We build, we decorate, we defend what we have built, and then the waves come.

The world you and I live in is harder than the descriptions of it. People call it volatile. They call it uncertain, ambiguous, complex. These are honest words, but they are too clean. They sound like words a businessman would use in a meeting. The world is worse than that. The volatility piles up and becomes something we cannot predict at all. The uncertainty grows into things that do not even pretend to make sense. The complexity stops being something you can study. It becomes something you have to walk through, one step at a time, with the next step never quite visible. This is the actual texture of being alive in this century. Most philosophy is written as if it were not.

Every religion and every philosophy that has ever been written is an answer to one question. How to be a better human in a world like this. Christianity is one answer. Islam is one answer. Hinduism is one answer. Buddhism, Stoicism, Marxism, the modern self-help shelf at the airport — all answers to the same question. They disagree about almost everything else. The method. The metaphysics. Whether there is a god. Whether there are many. What happens when you die. What you owe your parents. What you owe yourself. But they agree on the question. They all want to tell you how to be a better human. That is the work every serious tradition has been doing since human beings started writing things down.

Most of these answers came from people who lived a long time ago, in places that no longer exist, dealing with problems we no longer have. The answers stayed. They were handed to us before we could ask whether we wanted them. We did not put them in our heads. They were installed. Then we grew up around them, the way a tree grows around an iron fence—slowly, without noticing the metal becoming part of the wood. Most adults are walking around with very old answers still living inside them. They believe these are their thoughts. They are not their thoughts. They are inheritance.

I know this because I was one of these adults. I want to be honest about this before we go any further. I am not writing to you from a place where I figured it all out and have come down from the mountain to share my wisdom. I am writing to you from the long, slow, embarrassing business of noticing how much of what I called my thinking was just borrowed material I had never questioned. For most of two decades I read philosophy. I read scripture. I read the people who claimed to have read everything. I thought all this reading was making me a thinker. It was not. I was a collector. A man with a large shelf of other people's thoughts, who mistook the shelf for a mind. There is a particular kind of foolishness that only educated people are capable of, and I had a fine version of it.

The work actually started when I began to suspect this. The first real act of thinking, for me, was not the discovery of a new idea. It was the slow, uncomfortable process of noticing that almost nothing in my head was mine. The next act of thinking was deciding to do something about it. This is what this book is, mostly. The notes of a man who spent years pulling out what had been planted in him before he could refuse, keeping the parts that turned out to be useful, throwing away the parts that did not, and building new parts where nothing had been planted at all.

The work is not gentle. It is more like a farmer pulling weeds from a garden so the plants can live. You have to be willing to lose things. Beliefs you held for a long time. Habits of mind that felt like home. The respect of people whose respect was based on you not asking questions. The unlearning is strict. It has to be, because the things being unlearned were installed by people who did not want them questioned, and they put roots down deep on purpose. But once the weeds come out, the soil is yours. You can plant whatever you want. You can grow a life that is actually yours instead of one that was inherited from someone whose life ended before yours began.

Now here is what I came to think after doing this work for a long time. The world underneath all the noise is actually quite simple. Everything is connected to everything else. The connection is not magical. It is mechanical. We are made of the same atoms as the trees, the stars, the people we hate, the people we love. The atoms have been moving around for fourteen billion years. We are the temporary arrangement of them that has learned, through human consciousness, that it exists. And the only way this whole arrangement holds together — the only way any of us survive long enough to do anything — is if the relationships among us are mutually beneficial. The relationships have to feed each other. The kind of relationship where one side wins and the other loses ends eventually with both sides losing. The kind where both sides win can keep going forever. This is not a moral claim. It is a description of how things actually work. Cooperation is the direction. Competition is the deviation. Any philosophy that tells you otherwise is selling you something, no matter how old or sacred it claims to be.

You may be wondering why, if all this is so obvious, the world is not already organised around it. The answer is that most people do not have a philosophy they can actually use. Modern philosophy is complicated. It is also useless for daily life. The books are too thick. The vocabulary is too strange. The professors who write them are mostly writing for other professors. The ordinary person who tries to read modern philosophy comes away more confused, not less. So they turn to religion. Religion is at least telling them something they can follow. The fact that what religion tells them is built on stories nobody can verify does not matter, because religion is filling a hole that nothing else is filling. Confused human beings reach for whatever explanation is loudest. Religion is loud. So religion wins. And the consequences of this — the killings, the suicides, the small daily damages to people who are told their lives are wrong because of an old book — endanger the human project itself. The world needs to replace this arrangement. The replacement is not more religion, dressed up in modern clothes. The replacement is a working, usable philosophy that does what religion claims to do without lying about the universe.

What should that philosophy do? It should make life happier. It should make life more fulfilling. This is not complicated. Happiness is what is left when sorrow fades. Fulfilment is when that quiet happiness keeps going without harming anyone else. A working philosophy should leave the person who uses it more delighted by being alive and less afraid of dying. It should make a complicated world feel less complicated — not by hiding the complications, but by explaining them simply enough that the person can stand inside them without panic.

Every philosophy worth its name eventually says the same thing about what to do next. Whatever path you take, the work is to become a better person. The path itself does not matter very much. The book you read does not matter very much. The teacher you listen to does not matter very much. What matters is whether you are, on the whole, becoming someone better than you were a year ago. If you are, the philosophy is working, whoever wrote it. If you are not, the philosophy is not working, however famous the author. There is no shortcut. Without the slow work of becoming a better human, a better world is not possible. Once that work is in place, the next step is the ending of unnecessary suffering — yours, and other people's, and slowly, the world's.

The deepest thing I learned, after all the reading and all the unlearning and all the building, was this. The control room of a human life sits in one of two places. It sits outside, in the hands of an authority that says it knows better than you do. Or it sits inside, in the hands of the person actually living the life. For most of human history, the controls have sat outside. The arrangement was simple. The world is too big, the self is too small, hand the controls to a god, or a priest, or a king, or a tradition, or a book, or a guru, and they will tell you how to live. In exchange, you give up the right to think for yourself. The bargain seemed fair to most people because the alternative looked terrifying. Being in charge of your own life is terrifying.

This book is written by someone who took the controls back anyway. When God signs out— and the title of this book tells you what kind of book it is — the controls do not vanish. They come home. They land in your hands. The map you used to follow turns out to have been somebody else's map all along. The voice you used to listen to was a voice you had never met. The judge you used to fear was a judge nobody had ever seen. And the freedom that is supposed to feel like abandonment, when you stand on the other side of all that, turns out to feel like sovereignty. You are not lost. You are, possibly for the first time in your life, the one who is actually steering. You are navigating a world that is volatile, uncertain, ambiguous, complex, and that gets stranger every year. The steering is harder. The steering is also yours.

I want to be honest about how I got here, because it is not the way the foreword of a philosophy book usually pretends. I did not invent any of this from scratch. I am not a man who built a cathedral in his garden and then walked out into the world and was surprised to learn that other cathedrals existed. I had read the cathedrals. I had walked through many of them. I had lit candles in some of them out of politeness or curiosity or fear. What this book is, honestly, is the result of one person taking the architecture of Eastern philosophy and the architecture of Western philosophy and testing both, brick by brick, against his own life. Some bricks were excellent. They are still in the book. Some bricks were defective. They are gone. Some places where I needed a wall, neither tradition had built one, and I had to make my own bricks from the mud of my own experience. The book is what stands at the end of that work. It is not a synthesis. A synthesis is just rearranging other people's work and putting your name on it. This is one person's working philosophy, assembled by one person, in one life, from what survived the testing. That is the most honest description I can give you.

There is one more thing I should say, because if I do not say it, the whole book will sound like a final answer, and I would hate that. A book that does not change is not a real answer to a world that does. The world keeps moving. New things keep happening. New knowledge keeps arriving. Anyone who hands you a book and says this is the final truth, do not question it, is selling you the same product religion has been selling for two thousand years, just with a different label on the bottle. This book will need to be updated. By me, as I keep learning. By you, as you take what is here and apply it to a life I have not lived and cannot imagine. The procedure is the permanent thing. The procedure is — examine what is in your head, keep what survives examination, throw out what does not, build what is missing, and never, ever stop doing this work. The book is one example of someone doing the procedure. The procedure itself is what I am actually offering you.

So here is what is in this book, and what is not. It is not a new religion. It is not certainty. It is not comfort. It is not a guru in paper form. It will not save your soul, because you do not have a soul to save, and even if you did, no book could save it. What it is, is a working philosophy by one person, offered to you in case any of it is useful. It comes in four parts — epistemology, metaphysics, psychology, ethics — which sound like long words but mean simple things. How you know what is true. What is actually there. What your mind is doing while you try to figure that out. How to act once you have stopped pretending someone else is going to tell you how. None of it is final. All of it is mine, until you test it for yourself. Then some of it will become yours, some of it you will throw away, and some of it you will replace with something better than I could think of. That is exactly how it should go.

If you are seventeen, eighteen, twenty, and you have started to suspect that the things you have been told about the world are not the whole story, this book is for you. If you are fifty, and you have begun to wonder whether you have ever actually had a thought of your own, this book is for you. If you are anywhere in between, and you are tired of being told what to believe by people who do not seem to believe it themselves, this book is for you. The cost of reading it is some hours of your time and some discomfort as a few old beliefs come loose. The benefit, if it works, is the rest of your life lived from inside your own head instead of inside somebody else's.

That is the whole offer. Read what is here. Argue with it. Throw out what does not fit. Keep what does. Build the rest yourself. The book is the example. The work is yours. This is what one human being found out by paying attention for as long as he could stand. If even one sentence in here helps you start paying that kind of attention to your own life, the years it took to write this will have been worth every one of them.