I was wondering if I can put my beliefs into easy bullet points. I’ll try. These are subject to change in the future but I like documenting my stages. I’m hoping to indicate the top ten beliefs I have that I act on. There are many other nice values that won’t make the cut.
- Life is objectively meaningless to an individual. But modern life is the culmination of a lot of events that puts us on the cutting edge of morality and technology and evolution. Finding subjective meaning is a good idea. Feeling great is awesome. Helping other people find or pursue their meaning is compassionate.
- Use any limited choice you get. Selecting your values is important because it’s where any meaning comes from and a lot of your decisions will be based on what you think to look for.
- You should look out for you as much as you can. It’s good to take care of yourself and it’s fine to be selfish. That’s not an excuse to victimize people. But if you don’t maximize your experience, are you expecting everyone else to not maximize theirs?
- People are very similar. My secret ambitions and fears are probably shared by lots of people. We should work together. Or at least acknowledge that with enough changes to my circumstances, I would probably be just like you.
- All rules and all facts are works in progress. They tend to represent a cutting edge of morality and science and understanding in general.
- Things that can’t be improved upon are lies. Put no stock in perfection.
- The strong or lucky or smart should enjoy their strength and loan a portion of it to the weak. Privilege is an opportunity to get something done for the unprivileged. It comes with the complication of having to understand someone else’s point of view.
- Pay attention to where you are on the heirarchy of needs. If you’re starving pay no attention to my opinion about religion. Do what ever you need to do to eat. If you’re in a nice situation, start doing more thinking. Find ways to help the hard workers who don’t have time to work smart. Then they can come over and play board games more often.
- Explore behaviors that aren’t necessary but should be acceptable. Public acceptance doesn’t happen overnight. If more people tried a gay experience for example, a lot of the instinct to treat gay people as weird variations of humanity that act totally different would go away. And you’d be able to tell when they were joking or if they were actually flirting with you. That’s just an example. Look into tattoos and cursing and bondage and music too.
- State the opinion you actually have. Not the one you think people want to hear. Then you’ll get serious comments that might help you grow. Or you might help them grow. There’s no reason to back down. You’ll be dead in a few decades regardless. A few millennial from now, your lifetime will be trivial. And its only value will be whether you felt like you were living it to your capacity or if you were constantly postponing being you.
