The book was more beautiful than I ever remembered it to be. Not anything about the book itself, or perhaps even the story much. The prose is pretty straightforward. There’s a good poem about halfway through, and some of the conversations made me smile but it’s generally quite average and there are even facets of the story that I don’t think contribute very much at all, as I’ve said before, such as the stuff about Bill and Charlie’s intelligence. The characters themselves, aside from Charlie, aren’t especially endearing, and they’re not hugely inspirational – or, not in a way that stands out compared to the significant thing I’m about to mention. It’s nice how they live their youths out in the early nineties and how much better off they seem to be without our apathy and our technology, but again, I take in all this stuff in a different way to how I take in what made this book more beautiful for me this afternoon than it has ever been before. The upcoming sentence takes more resolve to type than anything else that takes resolve that I could do at the moment. I’d sooner ask out a hypothetical ‘perfect’ girl than write this (hope that makes my point but it doesn’t sound right to me). What makes the book so beautiful is the relationships between the characters and the network of experience-sharing they form; heck, let’s go all out: their love for each other. Maybe that’s not specific enough. Their closeness, perhaps. I feel like I haven’t used enough words for something as big as this but perhaps ‘love’ is sufficient after all.

The elements (the characters) don’t matter up to isomorphism and you find that Maths is more about the maps/functions between the objects rather than the objects themselves. A nice Maths joke to relieve the tension I just amassed in myself with that. I appreciate that it’s going to be hard for your average reader to get why what I just wrote was such a big deal for me. It won’t be for certain others. I might be the type to be conceited but any family member reading this will have the biggest ever ‘I told you so’ ready to serve up to me. Well, I’ll figure that bit out later because I don’t think my conception is quite in line with yours just yet; I’ve not given in entirely. But this is not relevant right now and I need to go on and keep writing.

As I was realising the above account of why I was getting so much from the book this afternoon, I was also getting pretty close to the end. Which makes sense, given what happens towards (but not at) the end. I started moving around the room. I sat in the two chairs. I kneeled on the window seat. I read the epilogue leaning against the wardrobe, but nowhere was right. After I closed the book I went and kneeled on the edge of the bed and covered my eyes up and got angry at people in the street and the rest of the flat breaking into my solitude with their everyday noises. For some reason I was okay like that. So then I did my usual thing and started writing this post in my head, as I went through my thoughts. Here’s the specific sadness. I do not feel like I am or have ever been close to anyone in the way that Charlie, Patrick and Sam are close. And (ulp — here comes another deeply difficult to write sentence) I want it so much whence I felt so sad. Again, this is not the crushing weight of circumstance but the melancholy of some strange kind of solipsism. This needs some explaining. I do not want to hurt anyone. I have a few very close friends, but I don’t have what Charlie has. I don’t know. I feel the need to excuse myself because of what I just wrote because I don’t see how it is true but it feels like it is. In Oxford it’s a worse situation perhaps. I know an awful lot of people and am well-liked, but manage to somehow keep myself from ever getting anywhere near any of them. And while my respect for my family members grows more and more as time goes on, and I love them and appreciate their support with things, we are not and don’t see how we could ever be close.

Maybe I’m completely unable to put things into perspective because I’ve not had the right experiences to match up with the amount of growing up I’ve done so far. Maybe I’m feeling lonely in a way that only romantic/whatever-you-want-to-call-it-to-distinguish-from-friendship relationships can fulfill. I have no idea; these are just possibilities that occur to me.

As I mentioned before this faded after a little while and I was just sad, and the hope I mentioned earlier started to rise when previous hypotheses from that tutor reoccured to me. And that’s all there is say because it’s really that simple to me. Or it’s not — because nothing is — and I don’t know myself well enough to explain it any further. And the couple that everyone else thinks are shallow and angry and I think have rather more to them when you get to know them are shouting and complaining about stuff in the kitchen and I’m struggling to concentrate. So I’ll go on. It is about this point that I realised that I needed to write right now before I lost what might just be me losing my grip on something one should not lose one’s grip on, but something that might also be something more significant. So I closed the curtains, turned the light off, locked the door, had a glass of water and started to type.

I haven’t long left before the armour’ll be back and I’ll start making excuses. Some of them will be real or legitimate and not really excuses at all but some of them won’t be like that and the worst thing is that I won’t be able to tell the difference. So as I said I would I’ll do the thoughts I’ve been having, now I’ve done the feelings. Back on familiar territory, you’ll forgive me if I lose the thing I might have had when writing the above if indeed I had something. This stuff is where the title for this post comes from. This messy, disjointed post with long running sentences that I would usually edit to death before hitting ‘Publish’; not today.

The first thing is of the relativity of feeling and of how the people around me in Balliol have an absolute view instead, and how I think this has infected me to the extreme and harmed me and all those others around me. I do not mean to imply that this is something unique to Balliol at all, but this is the first place I’ve personally been in that has made me see it clearly. Towards the end of the book, Charlie tells us how he won’t tell his children that some people are starving when they won’t eat their greens; he tells us how he his sister, about to start university, visits him in hospital to express how foolish she feels for being worried about starting university when his situation is that much worse, and Charlie doesn’t think she should feel foolish at all. Yes, there is a point when we must pull ourselves together and get on with things, and it is good when those around us who care for us are honest, and point out when we need to snap out of it. But the modern world microcosmed in Balliol, takes this from honesty to stony coldness. Excitement or enthusiasm is not only not cool, it has very little worth at all. Not everyone thinks this, but there are elements who do (I do have a particular Balliolite or two in mind; maybe others can guess who), and it infects me. We are not allowed to feel anything but mirth. Seriousness is forbidden, torn down by banal student humour. And I bring it home with me and deride friends who are only a tiny bit younger than me in the same my enthusiasm and seriousness can get derided here. As an aside — I reckon that this probably has a lot to do with fact that people in Balliol are so utterly useless at relationships. They’re so deeply afraid of being honest with each other. It upsets me to watch them make such a mess of things over and over.

I haven’t done a very good job there and this is a subject on which I would like to expand upon and elucidate more clearly in the future. The addition that has come from today’s thinking is that feelings are relative. If we attempt to consider seriousness or other types of feeling out of context in an absolute manner then we’re only going to end up throwing it all out. Maybe, then, there is a place for privacy with one’s thoughts; maybe I am wrong in my policy of being willing to put pretty much anything up on here. We must watch ourselves. It is too easy to forget this. We must consider others and their reactions to things more carefully. Very, very little is worth throwing out or deriding. Perhaps I am too judgemental after all.

One final thought that, as I say, I’ve had recently and have had reinforced and enriched from my reading this afternoon and evening. All Charlie wants is for life to be enough. And I have a new word for this, based on how I was feeling around midday yesterday in the sun: he wants serenity. Yesterday I had serenity when a figure I see as having authority cleared my name of some stuff that has dogged me and I felt that I could be okay with everything. This deserves writing about properly, something I’ve been wanting to do for ages, and I will soon enough. But the trick is to not live off temporary boosts of serenity from external sources. The trick is to get it out of ourselves somehow. I’m starting to really appreciate stock phrases like “be happy with yourself” in this new light, and as I say it’s a series of thoughts that I will come back to.

I think that’s all I’m going to be able to get past the defenses. I’m feeling more and more normal. Better quit while I’m ahead. I’ve just spend roughly six hours in self-indulgent (bwahahaa it’s back, here I go!) reading and writing. Now I have reading and essays and problem sheets that, as per usual, I’m not really in a position to do much with, but that’s the same as ever, so I don’t want this seeming like an overtly negative end to this post. Just reading it all through. Bitty and childish and whatever. But I wrote it so I’m posting it, bah.

One possible blunt answer is that they disagree with Plato I guess. It’s very hard to begin to talk about these things when you have words like ‘philosophy’ all over the place, something which is of course hugely ambiguous due to the amount of people that have used it to mean different things.

While most PPEists do this paper, it’s very rare for a Math/Phil such as myself to be engaging with it: I am scoffed at by fellow students for my choice. To them, the likes of Descartes and Berkeley were ‘wrong’: their arguments can be chopped up with powerful counter-arguments that philosophers have had a good few centuries to come up with, and if we can’t prop them up in our own terms then that is that, and they are discarded by the wayside. People tell me that by studying them in this paper I’m wasting my time, and that if I wanted to do this sort of thing then I came to the wrong university. For them, Philosophy in Oxford is solving the problems set out (reformulating them as we go, of course – I do not wish to paint an entirely condescending image here) in the twentieth century, couching things mostly in terms of language (‘meaning’ is the buzz word) and then going at these things like Maths problems. Philosophers in the top universities have their posts by virtue of their ability to churn out impressive-looking articles in journals that attempt to move the debate forward, closer to a solution that they think is within their (department’s) reach.

This is not, of course, to say that they are not extraordinarily clever and interesting people – a derogatory tone is coming through and I must stop myself. What we might call professional philosophers do in places like Oxford has a great deal of value. Firstly, they are attempting to answer very important questions, and even if they take the tack of solving problems rather than merely increasing understanding of the problems themselves, as I prefer to do, they’re still contributing immensely to said understanding with their attempted solutions. Further, Kant might be more subtly brilliant than your average Oxford Don, but the latter is several orders of magnitude better at expressing himself. The clarity and rigour that we have achieved is of immense value, allowing us to unlock philosophy for our own minds. As someone who gets cross with his tutors telling him to stop telling a story in his essays, and instead to lay things out as the basis of tutorial discussion, I might romantically bemoan the fact that this rigour and clarity often comes at the expense of elegance. But that doesn’t diminish its value.

The issue here is that Philosophy has been reduced or confined to this clarity and rigour. And as some would argue (see E. Craig, The Mind of God and the Works of Man for one example though this is not a book I have read all the way through), there’s a secret worldview here. In setting themselves up as something different to the worldview-creation of the likes of Descartes and Hegel and Kant, modern philosophers actually have a deeply pervading worldview of their own. What greater intellectual criticism is there besides inconsistency! Having not finished the book or thought enough about this, I can’t follow this line of thought further.

What I’ll do to conclude this post is attempt to set out what the value of a serious consideration of our Great Dead Colleagues, to use my tutor’s term, is. My sceptical tendencies, and avoidance of assent, will come through here to anyone who knows me. The difficult thing about reading someone like Descartes is getting into his head and understanding how his philosophy fits together. While it is interesting and enlightening to challenge his arguments in the modern context of the way we all like to think now (the hegemony of liberal positivism about the natural sciences), it will always seem puzzling why these criticisms did not occur to Descartes or his contemporaries, and if they did, why they did not appear to persuade him. But these GDCs are clever, seriously clever. Their minds were complex and so chances are they did come up with similar arguments, but they weren’t relevant. In the same way that we very quickly dismiss questions of faith today (or, so many of us do), they would see them as being very relevant, as an example. So the challenge is to get into their heads and see how everything fits together. A big part of this is analysing their arguments in detail, but after they appear to fall apart, we still have a lot of work ahead of us in our study of that philosopher.

Now onto a more recent thought. Take these worldviews and package them up (not sure that’s really possible but it’s enough for this), and then put them in a row, chronologically, say. At the far end we have our current worldview, and the way that subjects like Maths and Physics make progress leads us to believe that we have a upward trend in gaining a better understanding/solving problems/whatever you see Philosophy as wanting to do. The views get progressively better over time, with some weirdly interspersed ones of course. But here is the mistake from my extremist’s perspective. Actually all we have is difference. Each worldview is different and appealing to different people for different reasons. Understanding the reasons for this (based in analysis of argumentation), and why the various views appeal, is a monumentally more difficult, more valuable and deeper challenge than the mathematical problem solving that modern philosophers seem to want to put their time into.

This is very unpolished. It’s critique of modern philosophy remains too strong despite my best efforts. I’m worried I’m being pulled into my maverick tutor’s world; he’s a big fan of Mr Craig…

To return: if we can see philosophy as thus articulating philosophies – even if the historical detail of my account be questionable – there will be various consequences which I should like to encourage. One will be an increased sympathy for the idea that philosophy may occur in a variety of media. There may be a number of ways of giving expression and substance to such an underlying picture: a novelist may give it force and content by embodying it in a narrative, a poet with imagery; but it could still be a very similar picture to the one which the philosophy fills out with what in a generous sense we may call logic.

E. Craig, The Mind of God and the Works of Man (Oxford: OUP, 1987), p. 4

These things are academic, these things are personal, these things are the mix in between which is often the most interesting – attempting to apply principles of good thought to the difficulties that go on between the people around me and between myself and others (or, as is more usual, myself and myself).

The only way to get over my unwillingness to do this, which stems from my perfectionism, is to just get some stuff written publicly and start to see that it’s quite alright really; otherwise this blog is limited to more planned out pieces rather than freer charges into language. So let’s have something tonight – here we go.

I think that the hardest thing about undergraduate academic study is maintaining mental focus. While one might sometimes work for an hour and a half on a problem or a chunk of an essay (or a whole essay…), this is rare for most and often the challenge of keeping focused is half the battle right there. I am not just talking about getting distracted by e-mails and the like: I don’t suffer from this because I turn my Internet access off when working on my laptop, and the distraction potential of the various text files I have on here is pretty low… That’s a different kind of lost focus. The other is the main thing that holds me back. By not having one’s mind 100% on the task at hand, it takes longer and thus not only do you lose time, but you lose track of the bigger picture of what you are doing and this is fatal to developing a proper understanding of the area you’re looking at.

The fact that a task is hard contributes to this, of course. Right now I’m writing about something that I’ve had floating around for some time. It’s not a hard topic, and I’m familiar with what I have to say on it, so it’s quite easy to stay totally focused in and just type type type away. Reading a hard piece of Philosophy or thinking my way around a hard Maths question is entirely different. In the former case, I don’t really understand how it happens, but when I’ve been doing nothing but read and type out the occasional note and I find I’ve got through rather few pages and rather little content in the time I’ve been sitting there, it’s easy to see how my mind doesn’t really feel like it’s been working properly. It’s stuffy and not alive with whatever it is I’m dealing with. In Maths, this factor differentiates me from my classmates, from what I can tell. I might do more hours of work, but when they sit down to do it they gosh-darn do it. I keep finding myself staring a question not really thinking about it, not really being proactive, and get really frustrated that I’ve just spent four minutes doing that.

Thinking back to the various things I’ve heard about studying, the first thought is that this has something to do with the length of time one tries to force one’s brain to concentrate for. Go on too long and the words just don’t sink in. Fine. But finding the happy medium here is very difficult. If I try the “take a ten minute break every hour and your focus comes back after” strategy, I find my focus after the break to be just the same as it was before. It’s almost as if I have just half an hour of properly focused brain power available to me each day! Surely I am capable of more than this. The only other thing that occurs to me is the need for more sleep. I only get about six/seven hours at the moment which is a bad habit, and I should be getting eight.

I imagine that fellow students are nodding their heads at this post in general. You’ll ask someone how their afternoon in the library went when you leave together when it closes in the evening, and they’ll tell you that for some reason they can’t quite put their finger on they achieved almost nothing, and are thoroughly frustrated at having set aside the time with apparently no real return on it. Half of the time they have got more out of it than they think but the topic is sufficiently hard that a second run-through is needed in order to become comfortable with the material. But so often it’s a case of not being able to summon forth the necessary focus. I remember reading an article in a magazine a few years ago about students taking various drugs properly used against ADHD to allow them to pump out an essay close to a deadline. A radical solution better solved by actually doing your work, but perhaps related to this family of problems.

I’m not ever going to solve this problem; based on the way that I have described it, that would be tantamount to giving myself unlimited intellectual capability. But it holds me back and thus makes me very unhappy and so if I could improve on it just a little I would be a great deal better off.

It feels pretty hopeless though. Supposedly it was leaked that the budget will go from £11bn to £5.6bn for higher education. This is completely insane, of course. But what else could we possibly expect from Con-Dem?

It was quite humbling to sit there in that room discussing something as big as this as it was happening. World War II was obviously completely different in scale and nature but I imagine the radio announcement from Churchill had a similar air to it. We all knew this was coming, we all knew it was going to be terrible, and somehow it all mixes up into something I can best describe as despair.

The only real element of the philosophical system I aim to set out that was present in my last post was the claim that the timeless edict

The unexamined life is not worth living.

—Socrates in Plato’s Apology

forms the axiomatic basis of my system of ethics. In this post, I hope to say what I really mean by this loose claim, and also give a little argumentation for it; why I am led to choose it above other similar starting points.

On its own, the sentence isn’t very helpful. What is the unexamined life; where on the scale between the extremes of a fifty year orgy and a fifty year meditation or degree course does it lie? By what standard, necessarily (we might think) external to life are we to judge whether or not something is worth living? The statement is informal and to worry about this misses the point. What I really mean is that my starting point is the belief that a careful, rigorous consideration of everything that we come across in our mind and outside it (if such a place exists; it is irrelevant for we certainly have a mental model of it) is worthwhile. I assume for now that it is the only thing that is truly worthwhile, to avoid adding axioms to my system, but as I go on it will surely be questionable whether I really have avoided drawing on anything else.

But my language remains loose as to the nature of this examination, the word I will use to refer to this assumed good. I am stuck, as we all are, in the context of the society I live in, and what it sees as thoughtful examination. For purposes that will become clear in the political parts of this series, I shall attempt to give a minimalist account of examination, and what I mean by it. The full view of what it is will likely emerge as we go further. Examination, then, is for me very philosophical in nature, taking that term in the informal sense that may be used with derision against philosophers in the modern world: it’s about questions and an understanding of those questions, not about asking questions and then seeking out answers to them. In my next post I will talk about the scepticism which leads me to this statement, but for now just consider the two things, side by side: a deep understanding of a question and how it relates to other questions and everything else that we come across, and an answer, which I take to be a statement that removes the uncertainty of a question and fills the gap that it leaves.

It is obvious that the latter is almost entirely useless without the former. An answer will not be accepted by anyone in a thoughtful state of mind until they have at least a rudimentary understanding of the question that led to it. So we are certainly to have the former if we are to have either. But as I will argue in my next piece, when one has a decent level of understanding of the significance, ramifications and nature of a question one will quickly realise that any answer that might be a genuine addition to the thoughts one already has is entirely out of reach.

In setting this out I have used the word “axiom” without any definition, and it has been clear that the definition used in mathematical and philosophical logic isn’t what I intend. A better way of describing my intent might be to say that I am treating this belief that I have tried to expound as self-evident, that I am treating it as if it contains everything it needs to justify itself within itself, in the same way that we see the phrase “a bachelor is an unmarried man” as being true.

I will close by attempting to describe the reasons which lead me to this axiom rather than others, to set this project in its context. On the assumption that working from single starting points makes sense, there are many I could have chosen: religious, utilitarian and scientific (where science is taken to mean the optimistic view held widely today that it can discover the nature of the universe, rather than what it might sensibly be taken to mean) spring to mind. I am biased, no doubt, by my good experiences of studying Philosophy and thus my axiom might be summarised as “Philosophy is good”, but in doing so we would strip away subtleties that I would rather keep around.

I do have, though, one reason that I will boldly claim as being a strong one: the advantage of examination is that it is capable of self-replacement. If it turns out that we are able to find that we should base our lives on something else, and in some way not known to me we are able to secure certainty and infallibility for ourselves on this point, then we will have found it through examination and examination will yield to it: we will have examined our lives and come to a different conclusion because our scepticism and thirst to examine will have driven us to pursue all possibilities. Examination is capable of being an axiom yet not being absolute. This lies in stark contrast to many other starting points; I will not be to crude as to exhibit “examination is bad” but instead briefly, and bravely, knowing my readership’s knowledge of my views, consider “seek happiness”. In following this, we will only perform examination as a means to an end, and chances are in gaining happiness for ourselves (or our society, depending on the formulation), and if another axiom is in fact that right one, our chances of finding it are either reduced or entirely destroyed.

I take the rigorous, “philosophical” examination of everything that we come across to be the basic good that we should pursue. The reason that leads my mind to this starting point rather than any other is the way in which examination is capable of finding out other starting points that may be improvements on this one if they do exist, and of yielding to them. But this is just my attempt to describe why my mind has got where it is. The important thing to take away from this post is that I am treating examination, as elucidated here, as self-evident, and I am basing the rest of this project upon it.

The unexamined life is not worth living.

—Socrates in Plato’s Apology

In the proceeding months I have realised that a great deal of what I claim in moral, political and academic contexts can be traced back to a strong belief in the truth of Socrates’ claim; indeed, I have an almost axiomatic respect for it. My aim in this series of posts is to put together all the claims that I make that seem to me to stem from this, in an attempt to figure out just where I am coherent, and precisely where a great deal more enquiry is needed: where the strengths and weaknesses of my thought lie. This is my promised essay that I have deferred to in discussions for months.

In characterising this as a work of Philosophy, I am aware that I invite the ire of many modern academic practitioners of this, the greatest of all mental pursuits, in that I would seem to be merely setting out a system of belief for my own reasons, rather than attempting serious analysis or dialectic. But this is one of the great issues I have with the philosophers I find in Oxford. Philosophy is merely the thoughtful, reasoned and – crucially – rigorous pursuit of understanding of the deepest questions we are capable of asking. For me, what I am asking here are the deepest questions I have yet to come across.

I write this now as an undergraduate who has yet to properly engage with the analytical Philosophy of my course. As is the nature of different levels and ways of thinking, it is likely that my future self and others who I pass this to will see this as immature and underdeveloped. But every piece of writing has its context, and all I ask is that this be considered in that of my mind, which has only too recently been opened up to the weaknesses in our common modes of thought, and desires little more than consistency, and that which I intend to set out in this essay. Nothing here is fixed. I intend to revise this in subsequent years, when the hold of analytical positivism over me will likely be somewhat stronger.

Ultimately, what I aim to achieve in this piece is a foundationalist linkage of the various passions I have for idealised ways of living into something drawn from the natural light of reason, as Descartes would put it, and the above Socratic edict. This is then something I can mould and shape, add to and remove from, as the years go by. But we do well to be clear where we are beginning if we intend to get anywhere at all. I do not expect to get absolutely ‘from point A to point B;’ I am under no illusions that from this axiom I can derive with compelling certainty very much at all. But I want to see what I can get, and whether my informal reasoning draws on any other axioms, and then to see how useful and sane the foundationalist project turns out to be.

I suggest a technological analogy. I have a server that sits in London and stays on continually, serving my e-mail, storing my files and keeping processes running throughout the night when my own computers at home are switched off. The data on that server is backed up in two ways. When I first put the backup system into place, I took a full backup. The entire content of the server’s hard drive was mirrored onto the backup server. Following that, incremental backups are performed nightly: the way in which the hard drive contents has changed relative to the full backup are recorded, which means that the backup server consists of the original copy, and for each day since a description of how the files have changed. This series of posts is my first full backup: I want to be in a position where I can write incremental backups of my thoughts with something to refer back to. Every so often the backup server is wiped and a fresh full backup is made, when the contents of the hard drive have changed very substantially. This is what I will do in years to come.

I write this as a series of posts because I would like to accept and incorporate criticism, if anyone will be kind enough to present it, as I go along: I’m taking a foundationalist approach, and it is harder to extract misshapen and unstable stones later on, when they have much of import piled atop them. This introduction was written in the Spring of 2010, and then added to in early September. I’m ready to go. Watch this space.

Next: examination as the good

The worrying thing about all of this is that at the end of the day, I am faced with the arguments from pure utilitarianism that in fact any claims I make to be doing something with any kind of meaning and worth could always be derived from the positive emotional state that I seem to gain from such pursuits. It is depressing to consider the possibility that all of these high-minded claims we all try to make to living what we like to call rich and fulfilled lives in which we flourish potentially all collapse with startling rapidity into mere attempts to release certain chemicals in the brain. But I’m not sure this argument is quite so deadly as it sometimes seems. Perhaps happiness can be equated with something being ‘good’, as merely a definitional reaction to certain events which we see as either worthwhile, fun or interesting. I’m not going to try and develop this argument now as I’m not entirely sure why I sat down to write this post at all, but it is something to consider. I maintain my scepticism. I don’t know anything but merely work on through life according to my nature, and try to examine it as I go for if I did not, it would be just another life, even less significant on the scales of history than it already is.

So is there a useful conclusion from these considerations? One is, I believe, simply to keep such considerations in mind. When an event or person or idea overcomes the senses and dominates the mind’s thoughts as it twists through the day’s considerations, stepping back is a useful tool. Take things slowly, get other opinions, recognise the deficiencies of one’s own intellect as something that, when it cares, can let emotion get the better of it. Recognise unnecessary desires as something that experience shows will be fleeting but don’t destroy them, merely add them to an ever-growing list of considerations and ideas to be tried if life offers such opportunities. For you never know where you’ll go next, who you’ll meet, or what you’ll be doing – and if it will perhaps seem, at the time, to be of the utmost significance.

I don’t know how good a model this is for humanity’s collective number but I shall work with it for now, for I have a great deal that I wish to write about this evening that has been brewing away in my head for a while and is finally at a stage where I am prepared to let it loose upon that small section of the world that will read this. Bear with my seemingly unrelated thoughts in the hope that they come together at the conclusion of this text. I’m coming to the end of my two week Easter holiday and overall I have not had a fantastic time. I have gone to bed late successively due to not being able to put down and cease participating in interesting activities, few of which have actually had any real value. And following this I have got up far later than I ever normally would, ruining my sleep schedule. Losing this time in the morning has messed up my ability to get things done and as a result the holiday has been incredibly unproductive. And this has got to me a great deal. I seem to be naturally wired up to be fairly lazy and yet conciously crave more fulfilled time. Every night I have gone to my diary and written about how useless I have been and how I will try to make the next day more useful but overall this has been unsuccessful. It’s very easy to say such things before bed when you can’t be more useful that day, and far harder to put them into practice the following day when there are distractions to be had.

I have realised, coming clear in my mind over recent weeks with the aid of some others but also added to greatly this evening, various things about myself that I don’t like but that I wasn’t really aware of too. I have long known that I have an inferiority complex and, horridly, am rarely happier (in the sense of glee) than when I outdo someone close to me or they fail through their own devices. I am also aware and have long been told by family that I have a tendency to be fairly lazy and to not follow up suggestions of things that I then find to be worthwhile and interesting. These are the things that I am already aware of and have written about on here before. But then there are other things. Internet colleagues who I get on well with on a personal and social level express their frustration with the fact that I tend to pick up jobs and interests fanatically, only to swiftly get bored of them but remain unwilling to let others in to take up the reins because, cynically I am unwilling to give up power, and more optimistically I am unable to recognise when I don’t have the time or willingness to continue to carry something through. Recently this has manifested in a steadily brewing mess over something I can’t really talk publically about yet which, in general terms, has other people at each other’s throats due to my negligence that I am now attempting to fix. This is something that I intend to work my hardest against allowing to happen again. I am going to rectify this particular mess and then continue in my role only if I genuinely have the time to and interest in doing so. But this is a general tendency I need to try and avoid – for my sake and more importantly those others it affects.

Perhaps more seriously in the context of my proclaimed philosophies is the fact that I have realised how dependent I have become on the opinions of others compared to how I used to be. The vast majority of this kind of thing is not, I believe, generally something that others are likely to notice although I imagine I have friends who are more perceptive than I am. But I have caught myself, with yawning horror, feeling from time to time as though I am missing out and want to be part of the common (that is numerically common) culture around me with all the activities that people tend to get up to, and as part of this, seem to have found myself caring more and more about what others think of me and how they see various aspects of my activities and personality. It seems I am in the middle of a crisis of self-confidence – that last sentence was difficult to write as it sits so juxtaposed with every other thought I hold dear. Essentially it seems I want, subconciously, to be more included – and this is the very antithesis of all that I believe in terms of the way one best lives one’s life, which is by no means an anti-social life, but one that is not in any way controlled by such interactions. More conciously speaking I remain outwardly confident of virtually everything and inwardly confident of everything except my own academic abilities and my lack of ability to use my time well as before. But this realisation, expressed not-so-fantastically here, has deeply shocked me. I do not wish to publically admit specific examples of what I describe here most generally.

Only one side of the story has been shown here as too often when anyone tries to analyse themself too far. While I might be someone who says strange things in an expression of the above subconcious social concerns, I am also someone who, I am told, listens to the views of pretty much everyone and tries to take them onboard intellectually as much as is possible. I have a hefty dose of rationality and employ it fairly successfully in the abstract sense, even if I fail hard at things of a practical nature in the real world, which fortunately concerns me little. I can pull out masses of enthusiasm and energy for certain things, even if it may trail off given time as described above. I think, I believe, fairly well – but I recognise that such a thing is never perfected in a life and I withhold my absolute assent from anything – even this. In these terms I have recently been described as a pyrrhonist by a friend and I am proud (after learning the meaning of the term) to have been addressed as such, and I intend to blog at some point in more detail about this world view. Conciously I am in a situation that I am content with. It seems that I need to reconcile my less concious self with these thoughts so that I move away from my recognised faults, and perhaps find others to be corrected. I don’t know how far the above recognised issues have infected my concious self.

So far I have expressed a series of realisations and opinions about my own, very human, faults and perceived strengths in what probably appears to be a very juvenile mental struggle traditionally associated with my age group, where I try to settle into one of the moulds that society has set out for me. So I should now set out the nature of this mould that I want to slot myself into; how I intend to try to work towards an improved state of being far removed from the problems I have now identified. How I can stop having holidays such as this where I waste my time away despite my claimed allegiances to mental activity and service. And what it comes down to is attempts to get into better habits and better subconcious processes in order to allow me to achieve what I conciously see as my goals as described at the beginning of this post. I need to slow down and think more carefully in common activities. I need to force myself to use my time better until it becomes something that happens naturally, given that I recognise that now it is a natural tendency towards wasting it that I seem to have acquired. I need to apply my reason even more commonly and liberally than I do now to be disciplined with myself. And I need to speak only when I have something genuinely worthwhile to say. And I suppose, additionally, following my various New Year’s resolutions wouldn’t hurt either. I have no desire to destroy my trademark intellectual faux-arrogance that is really pure enthusiasm, or to change from my forceful style once I have decided to pursue something. But by widening when I apply the essence of these and by more carefully selecting when to put forth their public fronts I think I can come closer to my various goals.

It’s very easy for me to sit here before going to bed and write roughly two thousand words on things that I want to do based on deeply held but assumed principles of what is valuable and ultimately meaningful in my life as I go forward. But I truly hope that by writing this kind of thing down I can take steps in this particular direction towards being more fully what I already hope I am in my better moments. I know I am never going to make a life entirely of these, but they seem remarkably few and far between these days and so maybe I can change that trend somewhat. And maybe I am just slotting myself into yet another pre-determined mould sat in by various other people who like to call themselves thinkers over history and am really just slumping into another mediocre life as with the rest of the world. But there is always the chance that I will transcend this, a chance that I know doesn’t exist if I don’t carry out this process of recognising and at least attempting to fix bad habits and practices that lead me astray and into despair over my inability to sort them out. If it’s all wrong at least I can move myself closer to a state from which I can head to a whole host of other destinations. Hopefully for once I have now made a firm step in a better direction.

But this is the point. There have been a thousand eighteenth birthdays like mine, there have surely been equally as many who will have realised this and thought themselves to be philosophically superior. As Charlie says in my favourite passage of The Perks of Being a Wallflower, his friends sitting in a cafe arguing over some issue are merely replaying a conversation had a thousand times before by similar groups. There is precious little originality, and there is precious little variety left in our lives. We laugh at the same jokes and we slot ourselves into the moulds available in society: our education systems turn out doctors and lawyers and managers who then pick from a similar choice of family circumstances. And then we lose our fervour, and become dull and routine, never changing as we plod away at the lives we have chosen. It is oft said that the young are idealistic and unsettled, and that we have ridiculous, ignorant ideas of how we want to shape the world. But this is something we must keep. If everyone just does something that’s gone before and occasionally something new is thought up, why bother? If we settle for what is practical and easy and we don’t instead try our hardest to bring variety and difference and change then you might as well collapse all generations into one and stamp a historical label upon them all as a era of repitition.

The above is probably full of fallacies and I’m sure I’m a hypocrite in so many ways here. If what we have right now isn’t good enough, and never will be according to this model, what is it that we are trying to reach? Why have variety if actually it doesn’t turn out to be very much different for individuals? Maybe by sticking with a routine and what one has one has merely reached the ideal situation. And maybe it is all irrelevent anyway as we all die, and it all ends. Maybe instead of worrying about trying to strike out we should try to achieve that fabled balance between the extremes of progress and conservation, and be satisfied in the knowledge that we’re never likely to divine some sort of eternal meaning, but trying makes us understand things better.

The above is what goes round and round in my head on a day to day basis. When I see a tired looking worker on the bus or a bored school pupil, when I see a stereotypical student or teenager or toddler just going through their lives, I consider these issues. I’m not going to try to pick a side here on the question of what the answer is here. All I would like to hope and set as a goal is that I keep thinking. If we ever put aside questions as unanswerable, there isn’t much point in having the questions at all. And in this again I’m just another would-be philosopher who likes to play around with questions, just someone else who secretly thinks themselves better for doing so, but knows they’re really not. So I’ll keep trying to be original and new, and I know I’ll never likely be happy with how that comes out, and I’ll never be satisfied with the quest. But a life with no certainty and permenance and purpose is infinitely better than one of false surety and contentment. There has to be something more than mere happiness. I suspect I’ll always hold that belief.

I won’t be any different tomorrow morning, but this was worth saying, even if it was a bit garbled and unclear – but that’s sort of the point. Good night.