Note (2025-11-05 07:18)

“How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love My Shitty Life”

Readers who prefer their self-help to come with a sheen of erudition can increasingly count on finding similar wisdom about human finitude dispensed in the philosophy section. Turning to philosophy to learn how to live is nothing new, of course. But the explicitly inspirational and instructional valence of much that appears today under that heading, even from academic presses, is striking — as is the apparent consensus that the central task of philosophy is to guide seekers to a greater acceptance of imperfection and insignificance. Sometimes these books focus on a particular school of philosophy, giving readers an “-ism” — existentialism, Buddhism, Taoism, and above all Stoicism, now practically a genre unto itself — with which to identify. Others staple together eclectic smatterings of received ideas into less partisan surveys on how to cope with failure and disillusionment.

At last we have managed to reify not merely social reality but the act of philosophizing itself, treating it, like our uncontrollable world, as a thing: a coping tool you might select, like an ice cream flavor, according to your personal taste.

At some point, however, I realized that I was spending more of my time thinking about my own despair than about the problems outside myself that were supposedly fueling it

While an exaggerated sense of our own importance is a recipe for both political and psychological disaster, it is also possible to overestimate our insignificance. Acceptance shades easily into excuse. With enough practice tolerating imperfection you can learn to forget what it is you’re failing to live up to.

When we are left to fend for ourselves, the conditions that shape our lives tend to feel alien and monolithic, forcing us to choose between the two polarities of self-help: the delusional optimism of positive thinking and the stoic acceptance taught by “philosophy.”

But preemptive surrender is no sign of wisdom. Any reality made by human beings can be remade by them. The price of this power is mutual obligation: we can never let ourselves off the hook. The things we can accomplish together are, by definition, within our sphere of control, even if we have to act through structures that are bigger than any of us alone to achieve them. As grating as it may be to admit, it turns out that some of those hoary positive-thinking cliches the philosophers rail against are true, as long as we stick to the first-person plural. We are responsible for how our lives unfold; we can do things that seem impossible.