The Pragmatist’s Guide to Life: A Guide to Creating Your Own Answers to Life’s Biggest Questions Kindle Edition

Malcolm Collins, BSc 2010 and Simone Collins

As humans, we get to choose what we believe and who we want to be. These are the most important decisions we will ever make. The vast majority of people never exercise their freedom to choose their identity and beliefs.

Instead, they allow others to tell them who they are, choosing only a few trivial differentiating traits for themselves. When they react angrily or generously, they ascribe the personality that led them to that behavior as being something outside their control. This is because in their minds "who they are" is something outside of their control.

We live life as a sticky ball rolling down a sidewalk, picking up a hodgepodge of stuff that just happens to be in our path. It is natural to try to convince ourselves that this hodgepodge is "who we really are." We tell ourselves this lie because thinking is hard, and society doesn't give us a good framework for structuring our beliefs about ourselves and the world. Instead, we are served a smorgasbord of prefabricated worldviews and told we have the option to choose among them. Worse, we live in a society in which there is no profession or organization we can turn to for help answering life's big questions that will not pressure us to adopt beliefs closer to their own.

If you ask them what you should want to do with your life, they tell you to do "good" things and then explain to you what you should believe "good" is. This is not due to any flaw in these individuals or institutions, but the fact that these institutions are designed from the ground up to lead people to the answers they believe are right. There is no institution designed from the ground up to help people come up with their own conclusions. We hope to remedy this.

The Pragmatist's Guide to Life is a product of the Pragmatist Foundation, a nonprofit dedicated to helping people live intentionally and consider alternative viewpoints. If you are interested in learning more, please contact us at pragmatist.guide/.

In this book, we encourage the use of applied pragmatic thought--a framework for systematically constructing your own beliefs about the world, leveraging those beliefs to decide who you want to be as a person, and creating the person you want to be.

ISBN: 978-0999715413