What is your life philosophy and where do you go to get one?

Why is it important to have such a philosophy? Because without one, there is a danger that you will mislive—that despite all your activity, despite all the pleasant diversions you might have enjoyed while alive, you will end up living a bad life. There is, in other words, a danger that when you are on your deathbed, you will look back and realize that you wasted your one chance at living. Instead of spending your life pursuing something genuinely valuable, you squandered it because you allowed yourself to be distracted by the various baubles life has to offer.

So where do you go to get one? If you head to the philosophy department of any university, you’ll be out of luck. If you try the church, you might find lots of advice on how to be a good person, and very likely how to have an excellent afterlife (if you were to believe something like that), but very unlikely to be given advice or guidance on living a good life. 

Our distant cousins a few millennia back took the question of “a good life” very earnestly. In fact, many of the original schools of thought– everything from the Hedonic schools, to the Stoics, the Cynics, hell even Plato’s “Academy” were all primarily concerned with this deepest of human concerns.

How do we decide what is worth valuing in our lives? What is worth pursuing with our limited time? What is our grand goal of living– and I mean grand– the goal that we should be unwilling to sacrifice to attain any other goals.