some arm-chair philosophy in my 10x10 room
i keep circling the same thought: that life doesn’t come with a manual, not really. not one we can follow with any certainty. we want it to. we want a system, a philosophy, something we can underline and carry around like a talisman. but the truth is less accommodating. we are inconsistent people trying to make consistent choices. there is no correct way to live, no elegant solution, no singular path that delivers us safely from beginning to end.
we are told to cling to the present. we are told to let go. we are told to trust, to protect ourselves, to try harder, to surrender. it depends on the day. it depends on who you ask. it depends on how much sleep you’ve had. the idea that one philosophy could hold up against the ordinary chaos of a human life — a flat tire, a breakup, a terminal diagnosis, an unanswered text — feels increasingly absurd.
we want clarity. we want a framework. but mostly, we want reassurance that we’re doing okay.
hope complicates that. hope, when it works, can carry us. it’s light enough to lift, strong enough to hold. on good days, it moves us forward. but it’s volatile. on the bad days — the days that collapse in on themselves — hope becomes a liability. it sharpens disappointment. it distorts what’s in front of us. too much of it, and we begin to imagine outcomes that were never on the table.
hope makes us generous with ourselves. it also makes us blind.
we overlook the obvious. we romanticize the broken thing. we delay the necessary ending. and we do this not because we’re weak but because we are, at our core, stubbornly built for belief. we want to believe that things get better. sometimes they don’t. sometimes they just change shape. the danger of hope is not in the feeling itself; it’s in mistaking it for certainty.
what’s left, then, is humility.
not the decorative kind. not the false modesty or the curated self-awareness. but the real kind. the kind that requires an honest look at yourself on a random tuesday morning. the kind that admits: i am difficult. i am impatient. i want more than i give. i am trying, but not always for the right reasons.
that admission doesn’t weaken us. it makes us better to live with. for ourselves, and for others. humility lets us offer kindness without needing it to be seen. it lets us make mistakes without rewriting the narrative to excuse them. it makes space for the fact that we’re all, to some degree, failing in public.
this is where philosophy becomes useful, if only briefly. not as a doctrine. not as an answer. but as a lens. something to hold up to the light and examine. some ideas are useful for a month. some for a year. some return later, reframed, quieter.
we’re not meant to live by one idea forever. we revise. we contradict ourselves. we let go of what once saved us. and that’s fine. philosophy doesn’t require permanence. it only asks us to pay attention.
maybe nothing really matters. but maybe that’s not the point.
maybe meaning comes in pieces. a phone call. a hand on your back. the last light of the day through the kitchen window. it’s never the whole picture. just a fragment. just enough.
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