At times, I find myself living a life without a meaning.
A purposeless life. No direction, no solid foundation: just me wondering like an aimless vagabond from day to day, moment to moment.
Some people like that. I don’t.
If depression has taught me anything, it has taught me that I need to think very carefully about what it is that makes me tick. What am I passionate about? What is it that makes it worth getting up in the morning?
For some, they never need to think that deeply. They can just live momentarily, leading a life of hedonism, pursuing pleasure and happiness, and their moments of existential angst are few and far between.
In my case, for better or for worse, I am a deep thinker. I need a solid purpose to my life otherwise my life falls apart.
And that is what has happened over the last few weeks.
I think we undervalue the importance of thinking in today’s society.
Perhaps this quotation from Simon Blackburn’s Think demonstrates what I’m getting at:
The word “philosophy” carries unfortunate connotations.
I would prefer to introduce myself as doing conceptual engineering. For just as the engineer studies the structure of material things, so the philosopher studies the structure of thought. Understanding the structure involves seeing how parts function and how they interconnect. It means knowing what would happen for better or worse if changes were made. This is what we aim at when we investigate the structures that shape our view of the world. Our concepts or ideas form the mental housing in which we live. We may end up proud of the structures we have built. Or we may believe that they need dismantling and starting afresh. But first, we have to know what they are.
Especially at my age, people get obsessed with memorising mark schemes and stuffing their heads full of as much information as possible. But that is a bit like stuffing one’s head full of bricks from every corner of the globe with no sense of direction, purpose or structure.
You end up with a huge disorganised pile of bricks.
Thinking is picking up each brick one by one and assembling them into a structure in your mind – your structure, full of your worries, concerns, memories, emotions, knowledge and beliefs.
In many ways, reading a book is a shortcut for thinking: instead of having to think about how to join a chemistry brick and a biology brick, read a biochemistry book and we’re already there.
Of course, it is a lot more complicated than that – we have many chemistry bricks and many biology bricks in our brain, where each brick is like a titbit of information we have acquired over the years.
But whilst reading a book and listening to a talk is where the acquisition of bricks happens, without organisation, the huge pile of data can get overwhelming.
Pure thinking is often what is needed to sort out the mess in your mind. Maybe a bit of speaking and writing will help too.
If you don’t sort it out, that mess in your mind could trigger some crises later on in life…
I highly recommend reading this fantastic article on the avalanche of information in today’s world and watching the video below – I really like how Chris Anderson visualises an “idea” and depicts how it is transmitted almost telepathically from person to person.
depressiondeconstructed 