Essay 0: An Introduction

Essay 0: An Introduction

Hey everyone, I am Sean, if all goes well you’ll know me nearly as well as I do by the end of this series. That will likely not end up anywhere close to true but I offer you this as my value proposition: I will explain some key nodes in my belief structure, discuss how they can be applied to improve our lives, and create a community of intelligent, philosophy-minded people (and me) to debate the topics and provide new perspectives. If through these debates I leave this experience not agreeing with a single claim I made in any of the coming essays then I am all the better for it. Sounds fair? This first essay will be an introduction, breaking down what the essays are, the rules for each essay, and some musings as to how I will handle the community aspect as it is easily the most important one. Note that I am open to suggestions on all three points and will update the following paragraphs with any changes.

Through these essays, I will attempt to convey the universals of the human experience, society, and ideology (in that order) through short, rigorous, and distinct writings. I will have each category (human experience, society, ideology) as its own distinct book, with the order in question reflecting the reading order of the books. This is because the universals of a society at large are built on the interactions of individuals with their own distinct experiences. Thus the understanding of society relies on the understanding of the individual experience of man but the opposite is not necessarily true. The same applies to ideology, as it is an idea that supersedes the other two, and while ideology can influence both of the other topics, one can understand ideology only by first establishing the underlying building blocks of the human experience and society, while the opposite is not necessarily true. In the same vein, each book will have many essays, and I will do my best to ensure that they are written in an order where no ideas of essays that are later in the chronology will be necessary to understand what I write in any given essay. So feel free to read around but know that I will be using key terms in these essays like variables in an equation, so once they are introduced in an essay they will be bolded to indicate that they are precise terms that mean something in particular. Key Terms may even come to mean something entirely separate from their commonly known definition, but highly legible to those who are introduced to them in a previous essay. A key term is how I convey a universal, which is a proposition that the term is representative of a quality shared by all relevant instances of its occurrence. No matter the differences in how a universal appears in different scenarios the claim is that they are the same, fundamental principle that is indivisible in any way beyond the building blocks used in defining it. Going back to the variable in an equation example, imagine “x” is defined as 3. The fact that 7-x=4 means that x reduces 7 whereas 7+x=10 means that x increases 7 does not change the fact that x equals 3. It does not matter how many operations we run the equation through or how we manipulate it, as long as x is mentioned we know it refers to 3. The thought experiment here is to apply universals through key terms in such a way that it demonstrates how seemingly unrelated situations are connected through identical underlying principles. Each essay, in a sense, can be construed as the description of a universal, but I am no atomist. I do not view reality as something that should be broken down into its components, so what is more important to me are the takeaways and ideally, every essay will include some semblance of an inspirational look into how the realization of the identical nature of seemingly disparate concepts can lead to greater joy and purpose. This is a major undertaking, so to make this a reality I constrained myself to rules that would emphasize quality, approachability, and feasibility over complete freedom.

Rules-based writing is the solution I have discovered for a problem many face, writer’s block, although my particular strain may be a little less common. I have thought up no fewer than 60 stories over the course of my life, but at most five actually had any major work done to get it on paper, and zero have ever been completed. When granted complete freedom I pursued my creative passions in that which elicited emotions out of me, my unresolved problems. I thought up stories where the main character went through the same problems I had and had a fun time creating the beginning portions. Over time a given story became more complex, other characters took the roles of alternate perspectives, and thinking up their conversations became a sort of critical thinking equivalent for me. This was particularly true because I often had a hard time thinking up a conclusion to the story in question, as I would actually have to think up a satisfying solution to the problem I was facing in reality for the conclusion to have any sort of emotional catharsis. But eventually, I think through every stage of the story in varying degrees of detail and wouldn’t you know it, the main character through his interactions with the other characters and the world attained a satisfying conclusion to the problems I, Sean, faced. I, in reality, achieved my cathartic moment in the same breath and went on to apply the story’s takeaway in my own life. In a matter of days, the strong emotions that drove that creative part of me started dying down as it pertained to that specific story. I was left with an improved worldview but nothing on paper to show for it, and an idea too grand in scope to be feasibly written.

I mention the above for a reason, this will be a break from narrative/emotional thinking, instead being more exploratory and structured by nature. Instead of focusing on accomplishing a grand narrative, this will be an attempt at highly rigorous thinking and daily habit-building. The first rule is that I will be releasing a new essay every two weeks, to be shared/uploaded every other Thursday starting December 26, 2024 for this essay. Each essay cannot exceed 2,600 words in length but should reach as close to this length as possible. In the event that 2,600 words are nowhere near sufficient, I will split the topic into two essays. The second rule is that there will be a developing list of key terms. Starting the chapter a key term is defined it will be bolded every time I use the term for the specified purpose for the rest of all of the books. The third rule, specifically for the first two books, is that these essays are to be more informational by nature. To localize universals and build them on top of each other, I will need to exercise solid, clear, precise, and neutral language, which is exactly the aim. An exception may be made for the end of each essay as I will emphasize how to apply the information to better your life, and that message gets across more powerfully with flowery, emotional, and biased language. The last rule is that in front of each essay’s title will be a number, when I refer to an essay number it will be in the title of the essay. With that self-agreement out of the way, I would like to take some time to theorize on what the community element of this will be and what it can evolve into.

My aims with this project are to improve myself and meet interesting people who also want to improve. As much as I will likely use language that would lead one to believe I am stating facts, I am a 20-something-year-old guy with no philosophy background so that could not be further from the truth. As much as this is an exercise in rigorous, analytical thinking and precise, concise language; it is also an exercise in vulnerability, as I truly intend to strip the clothes of pretense and vague thought and be completely naked through this. To the best of my knowledge, we all think in vague terms. We have beliefs that seem to directly contradict one another and recite ideas told to us verbatim. This is possible because we do not challenge our beliefs; we have an emotional attachment to many beliefs, and our inability (or lack of want) to go out of our way to kill the weeds in our mind is preventing the full expression of the valuable insights that are being suffocated by our lack of conviction. This is a difficult task though, as these weeds look and feel identical to the fruitful plants that better our lives from an emotional perspective, but there are differences, and to spot them we have to look from the lens of precise logic. Logic is not a place where emotions come to die, I am not advocating to live life robotically and to optimize everything, the case I am making is that the perception of logic as something irrelevant to the emotional, personal nature of self-improvement is bullshit. We can either wait for life to back us into such a small corner that we can finally pinpoint where our flaws (weeds) lie, or take the opportunity to be proactive by taking a leap of faith toward a new mode of being without waiting for our old ways to become intolerable. The latter, in my view, is the greatest skill we can ever have.

In a world where we’ve outsourced the interpretation of research to AI and “emotional fulfillment” to the world of social media and fiction, the coming generations risk becoming far more medicated, less independent, and less resilient than those prior to the turn of the millennium. I will create a group of people who do not want to follow this trend, who are willing to do what is necessary to keep their minds healthy by intentionally thinning the veil of willful ignorance when it comes to their own thinking. Of people who have the conviction to make the hard choice of killing the weak points in their foundations that they have leaned on for decades, no matter how badly it hurts to do so. For those willing to go through that, I promise I will do it along with you. What's more, this process may be an emotionally profound experience, as a profound story gains that quality of profundity from allowing a glimpse into the “correct” way of valuing the internal and external world, but no author has the potential to communicate that better for you than yourself and the people who know you. By getting rid of the weeds through precise introspection, hard conversations, and commitments to the world, we can walk forward on the path of actualization praying to never attain it as the views on the way can drive us to tears.

I mention the above for one reason, yes there will be a book, but the core of this will be the community element. When I took an ethics course my professor had a format that stuck with me forever, he split us up in groups of four and had us roleplay the most high-pressure ethical dilemmas we would likely ever encounter. His mindset was simple, iron sharpens iron. Iron does not get sharpened by imagining the iron it gets sharpened against, we need iron to sharpen iron. We cannot sharpen ourselves off of theoreticals, we need to be challenged by something that does everything possible to provide resistance. Thankfully, a mind can sharpen another mind. Of course, this is all theory, let’s discuss how we will practice.

The community will be hosted on a Discord server, if that changes I will update this paragraph. Here is the link to the community: https://discord.gg/VFCxSepf (I may shift it to WhatsApp eventually). One component of the server is an announcement channel which will be the first place any new essays are released besides the Blogger blog that the essay links will lead to. There will also be text channels, with each channel coinciding with certain essay numbers (which as mentioned earlier, will be in each essay’s title). Any discussion or debate on an essay’s topic or content should be started on the channel that has the coinciding essay’s number (and a general chat). Obviously I do not care if the conversation spirals into something else entirely but this will make scrolling back through debates easy and minimize overlapping conversations. If this needs to be said, I encourage challenging people on their thoughts; sparks (discomfort) is how you know iron is sharpening iron. If you feel nothing, the conversation is not personal enough and the same likely applies to the other person. Keep in mind though that this is in the name of self improvement and seeing the good in the world, so do not insult anyone or hurt anyone’s feelings just for the sake of doing so. In fact, as much as possible, engage with the idea as opposed to the person. A reason we have such a hard time communicating to each other as a society is that our media, instead of challenging the idea being debated, simply ruins the credibility of the person on the other side and makes personal assumptions about anyone who disagrees with them. The current dialogue landscape feeds on the destruction of trust and that’s what we have been exposed to our whole lives. It may be difficult to override the initial instinct created within us but please commit to it, those are the standards we uphold, and step number one in doing so is to challenge the idea, not the person behind it. We could always make another server for goofing off and I have nothing against fun conversations, but the intent with this server is to primarily be a place of challenge. Additionally there will be a voice channel, I encourage moving the conversation to voice whenever possible but remember to be concise when it is a group conversation as everyone should get the opportunity to talk. Hell, if someone has talked less than others, stop others from speaking and make sure said someone does.

That is all. This is an ambitious project, and I may have planned this to be larger in scope than it ever becomes, but this vision inspires me. The thought of a sacred place where everyone knows they are here to push themselves to the point of discomfort to come out a better person on the other side is beautiful to me, an emotional and philosophical gym of sorts. If the thought inspires you too, join me, I’d love to have you, but only if you can hold yourself to this standard while you are here. I will be releasing a new essay every other week at most (probably more often most of the time) that will be varied in their ideas and takeaways, but remember that the real aim is precision in thinking. Push your limits, find amazing people, and have fun! With that, I have nothing else to say, see you in 2025!