Spending time ruminating about life goals and objectives is common in one’s thirties. Naturally, this extends to going to the “life philosophy store” and identifying a label that resonates strongly with you, picking it up, and poring over said lore.

I’m Not the First to Take a Stab at Stoicism

Years ago, my friend Leoson wrote an article about one such label, Stoicism, while we were still actively running Very Clear Cut. It did not occur to me, then, to go through said article in extensive detail until recently, where I had the presence of mind to stumble upon this book (the reasons for reading it shall be left as a mystery to most readers).

At first glance, Stoicism indeed appears to be a very attractive branch of philosophy, especially among intellectuals. The reasons for this are quite clear; the “life philosophy store” certainly presents a convincing case for Stoicism. Like an attempt to be a good student, I tried to go through the book myself. One such section goes as such:

“And Stoicism, as is well-known, prepares its adherents for the tough times, gives them perspective, puts things in context. If life hands out lemons, the Stoic will certainly try making lemonade, but if that doesn’t work she’ll at least know why and be able to manage nicely.”

Of course, it cannot be clear in a general paragraph what the methodology of making lemonade is, but perhaps let me use an example to explain the issue with the paragraph above.

Suppose your loved one was subjected to an egregious assault that resulted in serious injury. I would find it personally quite difficult, and even somewhat dubious, to be unfazed (and hence feeling “at peace with the situation”) when I first obtain such a piece of news. Of course, this can extend to many other broader domains such as injustices in society and the world (in which they are plenty).

Politics

Some of you may know (or guess) I am involved, in some form, in the political scene. Given a finite number of people, and hence political parties, there are definitely a finite number of possible political ideologies that exist. People may find common cause with different political parties championing different principles. But even within political parties, it would be quite a stretch to suggest that its comrades are all aligned to a single political philosophy. In fact, in 2011, the term “broad church” was used to describe the ruling party in Singapore. I will, quite likely, be able to activists that may not agree on all aspects of the ruling party, but at least can come to various levels of broad consensus.

Privileges

Perhaps this topic hits me quite hard because of my own personal upbringing. Having grown up in a 4-room HDB flat all my life, and visiting friends in varying sizes of HDB flats in the neighbourhood, I thought that was the norm in my formative years.

It was only from some of the interviews that I had gone through over the years as a petition-writer at Meet the People Sessions (MPS) that I realised that the scale of privilege is a rather extensive ladder, with different members of society at different rungs of said ladder. It is admirable that many have indeed climbed up the ladder over the years, but not everyone can climb said letter. Should I, as a petition-writer, suggest to the resident that they should “try their best to make lemonade out of the lemons in life”? Theoretically, sure. But practically, how?

Philosophical Labels

Perhaps the core difficulty for many of us, in searching for philosophies we subscribe to, is the need to seek labels rather than logical and rational expositions on how someone’s philosophical positions are as they are. That itself is a logical position to take, a label is an example of “fast thinking” while an exposition is an example of “slow thinking”, to take a page from Daniel Kahneman’s book, aptly titled “Thinking Fast and Slow” (which is an illuminating read for me, and one I highly recommend). And perhaps the addiction to labels is part of a problem that somehow seems to be a problem I never face.

Some Physics training is probably to be blame for an expository approach rather than quick labels. Some friends have remarked that I can tackle many different topics, even if those topics are frankly speaking, quite outside my usual remit (). One reason for that is my tendency to build up subject matter starting from certain basic building blocks. Let us go through a simple example.

• Nutrition for children is quite important.
• As parents (I’m not one currently, but let’s use this for example’s sake), we want to nourish our child well.
• Supposing we have enough money, we want to buy a wide range of foods to let the children try (after taking into account allergies).
• We would like to get the children to build solid dietary habits. This means finding ways to get the children to like food across the important food groups.
• Not all foods are equal, and sometimes, bad preparation can make a child dislike a certain food.
• To overcome this, parents can try various tactical tricks to incorporate some beneficial foods into the diet.

Clearly these are all very simple statements that are quite difficult to disagree. But the WHO clearly highlights the importance of more active intervention to tackle this problem. There are at least three possible causes:

• Parents may not understand the importance of appropriate nutrition for their children.
• Parents may not have the ability to be good enough parents financially, subject to WHO recommendations.
• Parents may struggle to find tricks that work on their children to build up their eating habits.

Perhaps nutrition is quite clear cut (pun intended), because it is a science, unlike the philosophical positions that are on offer at our “life philosophy store”. So some of the statements are likely less binding and universally true. Or perhaps the statements, put together, do not form a useful enough representation to advise the practitioner of subsequent steps. And quite rightly so; many of these schools of philosophy have existed since centuries ago that may either require extensive reinterpretations, or worse, be downright incompatible with the modern world today. And with all the creative interpretations and misinterpretations of various schools of philosophy on social media, I would be hard-pressed to come to a conclusion that self-confessed adherents to most schools of philosophy even understand what they follow.

But that is not to say labels are not useful. Labels are quite useful to quickly advance conversations without the need to revisit basic principles once parties can agree on a common consensus on said labels, much like an engineering standard or internationally-agreed law. But how do we know if there is common consensus?

Purchase a Philosophy from the “Life Philosophy Store”, Anyway?

If you have managed to reach this part of the post, give yourself a pat on the back. Thinking about life philosophy is probably one of the hardest steps to take to become thoughtful. And in much of our search for self-identity, i.e. what makes me “me”, we will inevitably take a look at different philosophies. We will likely take certain positions on them and come to some conclusions on whether or not they generally resonate with us.

But there is little need to self-assign labels on ourselves, and in so doing, set ourselves up for a certain bias where we use our own self-assigned labels to then push ourselves closer to said label claims to be without quite understanding what it means. One example that comes to mind, curiously, is how people have to answer a question on their religion, and the label “spiritual but not religious” never fails to give me cause for amusement (I have since been off those apps, so I’ve no idea whether this has changed, but I confess this is probably the most accurate label among all of the rest that I couldn’t resonate with. Ah, labels!). Spirituality could range from simply pondering over meaning, and/or the existence of forces larger than the four fundamental forces of nature, to creating an entirely new belief system that did not quite fit in nicely with the other labels on offer.

One perhaps can do justice to oneself by realising that labels are simply the “fast thinking” aspect of some basic consensus of representation, but the “slow thinking” aspect of going beyond the label is what really enriches our understanding of what makes us… us?

For me, I bought quite a bit of different philosophies and tried to form my own views on what I believe constitutes the meaning of life. Maybe I’ll be able to write a label for it someday and too, place it in the “life philosophy shop”. And someday, someone else could come along and make the claim that the label I set initially was heavily misused. After all, the dead cannot rewrite the world of the living. Or at least I believe that’s the case.