The Philosophy of Everything 2e — Preface

Many people around the world are leaving religion. You may be one of them. You may have grown up in a house that was certain about everything important, and as you got older you started to notice that the certainty was loud but did not always hold up. You may have asked questions and been told not to. You may have asked anyway. If so, you are not alone. People are doing this all over the world, finding each other in groups online and in person, helping each other work loose what was put into their heads before they could refuse it. This book is for them, and for you. It is also for the person who has not walked out yet, but has begun to suspect the door is there.

A journey beyond inherited beliefs toward independent thought, a practical philosophy of happiness, and the freedom to build a life grounded in truth.

What the book is about is this. How to take the control room of your life back from God, and from whoever has been sitting in for God in your life — your parents, your teachers, the people who spoke for God in your house, the uncle at the wedding who knows everything — and live a happy life on the other side of that taking. I also explain why "first cause," the idea that something or someone had to start it all, is a myth. Both of these are old questions. I have tried to answer them in plain language. I used to believe the first answers I was given, and spent most of two decades finding out they did not hold.

By the time you finish, you will have asked yourself some of the oldest questions there are. What is the truth, and how do you tell it apart from a story told well. What the world is actually made of, underneath all the explanations laid over it. Whether you have any real choice in your own life, or only the feeling of one. Whether there is a God. What happens when a person dies. What your mind is, and how to take charge of it instead of being run by it. How to live alongside other people without making everyone miserable. And the question all the others are working toward — how to live a life that is actually worth the time it takes.

You have been given answers to all of these already. You did not ask for them. They were put into you before you could refuse — by your parents, by the religion of the place you happened to be born in, by your school, by the people who got to you first. Some of those answers are fine. Some are wrong. With most of them, the trouble is not that they are wrong. The trouble is that they were never yours. A life is not really yours until the questions underneath it are.

Most books that touch this territory spend their time arguing for or against the existence of God, as if that were the whole question. I do not. I treat the existence of God as a question already settled, and walk instead through the harder one, which is how to live well in a world where God is no longer running the room. The arguing-about-God books are useful if you are still standing at the door. This book is for the person who has stepped through it and is looking around, wondering what the rest of the afternoon is supposed to look like.

What I am trying to do, when it works, is small and practical. I put what is already known into a shape one person can use. I offer a plain method for being happy. I offer a practical way to live with attention, instead of with the noise most of us live in. And I argue for mutualism—the simple idea that the relationships among us, and between us and everything else, hold up only when both sides are getting something out of them—as the direction a life and a society should be moving in.

This is one version of the truth. The one I arrived at by going after my own happiness, honestly, for a long time. I am not trying to push it on you. I am trying to make philosophy something a person can pick up and read without needing a second book to translate the first. So I have kept it to what touches daily life. A philosophy that cannot be used while the dishes are being done is not, in the end, much of a philosophy.

I hope philosophers who come after me build on this work. They will find places where I was wrong, and places where I stopped short. That is how it is supposed to go. And I hope that you, reading this, take what is useful here and use it—to make your own life happier, by forging your own path to the truth. The book is one person's attempt. Yours will be your own.