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How do you use Philosophy in everyday life?

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A post in another thread presented a real-life example of how the poster used philosophy. I figure this might be a good topic for a separate thread where people can present any day-to-day examples of how their philosophy has helped them in some practical way, small or big.

What is it you do better today? What do you understand better today? What do you react to more rationally today? and so on... as a result of having a better philosophy?

Here is the text from the original post:

... as a specific example, a few days ago I used philosophy when maintaining my house. My HOA is going to be painting houses soon, and as part of the preparation for this they have asked me to replace some damaged wood on my garage. I was considering having the garage inspected for termites at the same time, on the theory that any additional wood damage found could be replaced at the same time. I was momentarily tempted not to do the inspection out of fear that some very expensive-to-detect damage would be discovered, and then reminded myself that if such damage existed it would still exist even if I didn't know about it, and that it wouldn't go away by magic. That automatic reaction was a product of having internalized and integrated the philosophical principles of the primacy of existence and the law of causality.

In effect, not having the termite inspection done would have required me to evade the truth of fundamental metaphysical principles, and by implication the existence of all the facts that support those principles -- i.e. existence as such.

That's philosophy in everyday life.

Edited by softwareNerd
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  • 2 weeks later...

Well, yesterday I got into a disagreement with my supervisor at work over which humerus was the right and the left (I remembered wrong) and on impulse I bet him ten dollars that I was correct. It turned out I wasn't and I was a little embarrassed.

I do things like this occassionally because when I think I'm right I'm very definite about it. This got me thinking, in philosophical terms, about some of my general character traits; pretty much my entire personality can be described as a fight-to-the-death between the Definite Jen and the Jen That Doesn't Like Being Wrong, aka Easily Embarrassed Jen.

So, I started wondering: is one of these character traits good and the other bad?

The answer is: they're both good, because they aren't primary. Definite Jen makes me stand up for what I think and Easily Embarrassed Jen makes me rigorous about knowing what I'm talking about, although occasionally not enough as you can tell from the example.

The primary character trait that both of these personality traits are components of is the determination that ideas are important. So there you go.

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  • 1 year later...

I think an important skill that I've gained from studying Objectivism is thinking in fundamentals, in essentialising everything. This means a focus on clarity, but more fundamentally, it means a focus on understanding. If you don't have an actual understanding of something, all clarity and essentialisation goes out the window.

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  • 2 weeks later...

My house is a modest 3 bedroom bungalow built in the late 1960's. I (with a great deal of help from my father-in-law, I'm not exactly Bob Villa) rebuilt my backyard deck a few years ago, and I stained it a beautiful sage green. My old wooden fence was definitely showing its age, sagging in places and its Battleship Grey (that's the actual name of the paint color!) paint was peeling quite badly. So I figured it would look a lot better if I stained it with the same sage green opaque stain that I had used on the deck. I stained several boards in the green color to test how it would look, and was very pleased. Knowing that prepping the old weathered fence for staining would be quite an undertaking, I rolled my pressure washer out of the garage and began blasting the loose peeling paint off the boards.

Shortly after beginning the pressure washing it became clear to me that my fence was in far worse shape than I had previously thought. My pressure washer, even at a relatively low pressure setting, took big splinters of wood off along with the paint in some places. In others, it shredded the boards like a chainsaw or drilled holes in them. Rot was rampant.

I pushed through the job, pressure washing most of the fence and then I stopped to survey the situation. Yuck. There were chalky white and inky black patches where old paint colours showed through, bare wood was exposed, and sunlight shone through ragged holes in chewed-up planks.

For a moment I thought that if I went ahead and stained the fence, it would still look better and maybe would last another few years. But then I basically said to myself " That's crazy! This fence is a rotten pile of garbage, not even fit for firewood! Staining an old rotten fence doesn't change reality, wishing doesn't make it so." Had I gone ahead and stained it I would have wasted a couple of hundred dollars on stain and painting supplies, and wasted a great deal of time, on a fence that a good stiff prairie wind would push over.

I put away the pressure washer and started pricing out a new fence...

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I thought of one, similar to khaight, about the primacy of consciousness vs existence. This is just one example out of many where I have internalised it.

I was riding something kind of like this. I went too sharply round a corner and the thing tipped onto its side and fell over. I was uninjured, but the whole time, rather than thinking 'Oh fuck oh fuck', I just calmly assessed the situation, made sure I was uninjured and spoke clearly to a guy who had pulled over to help me out. It was this standing order I have in my mind, that screaming at things won't make them change, that reality won't just bend to my will, and that I have to just deal with it through reasoned action.

The same thing applied about ten minutes later when the Police showed up. It turned out that the company I was driving it for hadn't got the thing MOT checked or Insured, at least according to the Police Database. The handbrake was also beyond a road-safe condition. Rather than getting stressed and angry at the police officer, I just calmly listened to what he had to say and dealt with each issue as I needed to: calling the company, having them find the documents, getting the thing somewhere safe to get towed, etc. The officer commented afterwards that I was unusually patient and understanding compared to most the people he deals with. This made me feel good, because I could see my philosophy was working in action. I was being seen as the sort of person I wanted to be. :)

Edited by Tenure
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I have a story that relates to attraction, which I've related in chat but not here.

I went to stay with a friend in Madison for a week. While I was in Madison, the friend picked up GQ magazines for me to read. There was one GQ article with a couple INCREDIBLE pictures of Adriana Lima, and interview. The pictures had me floored, I mean really turned me on.

The interview was about "what does it take to date a supermodel?" Reading the interview I realized it was really just her personal preferences, which included rather traditional values, some of which I really disagreed with. For just one example, she said the guy has to love his family, and: "If you don't respect your family I don't think you can respect yourself". From that and other pretty fundamental disagreements, I realized that I could never date her. And then I noticed that the pictures no longer turned me on.

There was no conscious decision to be not turned on, it was just a natural reaction--which was the most astounding part. ...I had always practically worshipped physical beauty, even wrote a song about it, and pedestalized the girls I interacted with, but have slowly become more values-driven. It was an amazing experience, like a milestone for me.

[edit] I suppose this doesn't qualify as an instance of consciously using philosophy, since it was an automatic reaction, but it came about as a result of pursuing my rational self-interest. Part of it was imagining being on a date with a really beautiful woman who was boring me to death, and realizing I wouldn't want to spend time with her.

Edited by musenji
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What is it you do better today? What do you understand better today? What do you react to more rationally today? and so on... as a result of having a better philosophy?

I learned about the significance of philosophy from comparing my family to myself.

2 examples that stand out to me are pragmatism and mysticism.

One of my family members believes the primacy of consciousness over existence. As a result, she reads tons of books about mysticism (like EMF, and other crazy kinds), she thinks she can tell a man's future by knowing his mother's name and his birth date. One time I saw her focusing on a stop light to make it turn green by the "vibrations" of her brain waves (or something). How does it affect her? Eventually she gets into troubles financially, because she does not keep in good touch with that aspect of reality. Since she believes in god, or "karma", she may sometimes not take actions to secure her values, because she would believe god is keeping them safe, so she can put her guards down.

Let's turn to the pragmatist one. He is a computer engineer. A very logical person who turned to pragmatism at some point in life. He sees chasing moral ideals as either foolishness, or, at best, as a legitimate luxury, on par with religious activities. "If it makes a man feel good, it's good, but you don't want to be an idiot and stick to principles".

As an example; when he was young, he told the truth one time about his evaluation of a project and it "cost" him a promotion. Now he thinks he was an idiot for telling the truth. But also, he lost a sense of joy, and he is immobilized in his personal life, and has no motivation to do anything. And of course - after you remove what is just and moral from your approach to work, what motivation can remain?

As for me - a positive example from my life is my approach to knowledge, and the understanding that it must be tied to reality. While many students think that the formula creates reality "it happens this way because of this formula", I understand the correct order, and therefore I do better at school, and actually gain knowledge.

This is just one example. The significance of philosophy in a person's life is paramount, as the 2 examples above show.

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