New Year, Knew You?

Have you ever made a New Year's Resolution, only to see it crumble within weeks? You're not alone. But why do some people succeed where others fail? The holidays have come and gone once again. Our little speck of carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen has hurled its way through another revolution around the sun. The Northern Hemisphere is in the depths of Winter. And so, it's perfectly natural to reflect on things that you would like to change as we ascribe a new label to the next spin, 2025.

I have noticed that this year in particular that many public voices are poo-poo-ing the concept of the New Year’s Resolution, with varying degrees of force. At the same time, there are the Resolution-stans. This eternal return of the new beginning is quite an interesting philosophical thesis and antithesis. Should we seek to be a new person, form new habits, or run down accomplishments that scare us simply because we as a culture have adopted an arbitrary point to declare a new year?

Well, it wouldn't be an interesting philosophical question if the answer was a simple yes or no. In reality and upon reflection the answer is that “it depends…”

Critics argue that resolutions are arbitrary and often set us up for failure. They point out that self-improvement is a continuous journey, not a race against the calendar. Some believe that focusing on external validation (e.g., societal expectations) can hinder genuine personal growth.

To begin with, it should be noted that I personally find tremendous value in the New Year’s Resolution. In fact, the series of events that led to me losing 100-pounds and transforming my life from a relatively sedentary and unfulfilling experience to an adventure of activity and accomplishment, was precipitated by a New Year’s Resolution. Hearing all of this public disrepute of this tradition that has added so much to my personal experience makes me question why it fails to be fulfilling for so many others. And why did it work for me?

The answer seems to lie in the nature of the resolution, the quality and specificity of the goals set, and the level of self knowledge possessed by the resolutioner. Goal setting is a skill that doesn't come naturally for everyone. Most resolutions are too vague to lead to a change. Consider the difference between these two goals. First, I am going to be more healthy in the New Year. Versus, I will exercise five times a week for a month and keep a journal of how I am feeling physically and emotionally. The second is aiming at the same purpose, but you are able to visualize the goal because it is specific. The other issue is self knowledge and authenticity. Is this an improvement that you really value or is this something that you think you should want? In other words, do you want to quit a bad habit to fulfill an internal intrinsic good, or to appease a family member or external societal norm. The first accesses the reward center of the brain while the second is anxiety inducing and unfulling even if you accomplish it. The key is understanding how to navigate your value system and having a space that elicits self-honesty.

A session with a philosophical therapist can help you get clarity on these issues. Visit my calendar and book a session today. If you book during January, Eu:PhORIC is offering a 50% Discount on 1:1 Sessions to help you achieve your Resolutions.A session with a philosophical therapist can help you clarify your values, identify your strengths, and develop a personalized roadmap for success. We can help you navigate the complexities of self-improvement and cultivate lasting change. Book your session today and discover the power of self-reflection and guided support in achieving your 2025 aspirations.

The Power of a Comeback Story?

Florida has had quite a storm season. Two major hurricanes in as many weeks. My heart goes out to those affected by Helene and Milton. My family and I were very fortunate in both events, everyone is safe, healthy, and relatively unaffected. That said, there is a spirit of hope that follows these events that I find incredibly inspiring and philosophically interesting. The calm and resolve after a storm is a truly awe inspiring phenomenon. These communities have been beaten down by an unseen force and yet they come together to turn a tragedy into a comeback story. I cannot help but ask a few questions: “To what extent is hope the power behind this phenomenon?,”  “What gives us the power to stand up when we’ve been knocked down?,” and “How and to what effect can we control the narrative about the events that happen to us?” 

Ultimately, these are questions that skirt the boundaries between free-will and identity, two distinctly philosophical areas with a rich written tradition. And, believe it or not I, your friendly, if not humble, neighborhood philosopher have some thoughts on these issues. Let’s start by setting up the scope of the conversation. 

I will not be discussing the ethical, particularly buddhist and stoic, implications of hope; but rather exploring hope as an epistemic and volitional attitude of statements about the self. That is hope as a proposition of belief in the possibility of positive change. We are not taking this concept to the logical extent of optimism. I do believe that optimism is a failing position and will talk with you at length about it if you have the time. 

Additionally, I am sidestepping the question of determination. I argue elsewhere that the claim that we are determined is inconsequential to our status as free-beings. However, I think there is an interesting problem set in what gives rise to this seeming contradiction of being completely necessarily contributed and yet having the capacity in a given moment to do otherwise, thus creating a sufficiency, which enfolds itself into the necessary state of reality. Instead, I will be looking at freedom from an assumption of compatibilism bordering on libertarianism. Where this problem yields the most fruit is when we explore the possibilities in any set of predetermined states that I find myself deciding from. 

Finally, we are assuming that the self is a dynamic experience that relies on the interplay of neural structures and personal experiences as filtered through an epistemic attitude. I am setting aside discussions of the soul and behaviorism. It is dynamic because sometimes memories guide our experience and beliefs about ourselves, sometimes our future sense and imagination, and the stories that others, including our past selves, tell about us. The self is an identical one that constantly changes. It is a paradox that collects our values and helps us face and/or amalgamate the world.

Well, I have written the introduction to a book to come to my thesis. Which is that hope is not the power of the comeback story and we are free to decide at any moment how we imagine our future. This is because all too often we accept false dichotomies or even sept-chotomies about our choices given the state of our worlds. Both fortunately and unfortunately, the power of the comeback story, our personal freedom in the face of a necessary world, and our abilities to change our personal narrator all lay within the same issue, namely critical creativity. 

We need to be able to take stock of the world we find ourselves deciding from, imagine as many possibilities as we can in that moment, while remaining flexible to change the narration if things don’t go as planned if we hope to harness the comeback story. If we learn to entertain positions completely without feeling compelled to adopt them, evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of a given solution, and justify to ourselves how and why we should change the way we view ourselves then and only then our future is unwritten. Injuries modify fitness goals rather than deleting them. Failures become the seeds of success. And even amoral tragedy can become the platform for flourishing.

This is clearly no easy process, and I have left quite a lot of things for you to consider, argue with, and lambast against. Philosophical training is one pathway towards this kind of self-mastery. No, I am not telling you to apply for undergraduate admissions and start your adult life over again. But, a session with a trained philosophical counselor can help you explore these philosophical problems and help get clarity on your personal value set. Today is the day you start your comeback story.

Book a session with Eu:PhORIC Services today,  Cecil would love to help you become the hero in your story.

Why do we complicate pleasure?

Hello pot. Pleased to meet you my name is kettle. But, being guilty of a misdeed that I accuse others of doesn’t make it any less of a misdeed. It simply means that we are both wrong and have mutual ground to improve upon. So, now I ask this question of myself.

Why do I complicate happiness? The answer I think lays in a philosophical exploration. Surprise! Its nature is actually both linguistic and cosmological. Are pleasure and happiness affective, under the influence of the emotions, or products of cognition that are noetic, governed by reason? If happiness is under the purview of reason and therefore rational, is the experience under our control or is it a pre-rational, intuitional response? Now, I know what your thinking. “This seems more complicated. I thought this was about untangling the rats nest that keep us from happiness?!?” Stick with me. We will untangle it. But first, we need to find the kink in the line. Another issue that we need to ponder is whether simple pleasure is better than grand pleasure. This line of reasoning is nothing new. Epicurus, and Epictetus identified that we tend to create barriers to ataraxia, that’s pleasure without pain, in the 5th century BCE. But, are they right? Is pursuing luxury, romance, and hoping for the best really a recipe grief and suffering? Finally, are pleasures and pains universal experiences, that is, the same for everybody? Or is it more like Jeremy Bentham posits, that the only thing universal about pleasure is that we all experience it from time to time. Maybe, the sensations and experience that individuals interpret as pleasurable is about as varied as a phenomena gets.

To be honest we aren’t going to resolve this issue in a single Blog issue no matter how cunning my turn of phrase. I just want you to think about these things, identify the threads of your pleasure and suffering. Think about the Gordian knot in front of you and analyze it. Sit with it for as long as your schedule allows, but at least a minute or so. After you’ve spent some time scroll down to the next section of this entry… (it’s in this post just keep scrolling)

Wait for it… examine that feeling you experience as you explore these complicated hard to distinguish thoughts. Note the critical air to your thinking,. Savor, the aha, the praxis, the rigor. Get excited when something that seemed obvious a moment ago is actually a dead end. That is a principle you can disregard. We all to often try to avoid complication. And the very thing we avoid might just be the key to happiness, and pleasure. As you sit here in contemplation on this issue perhaps you’ve had a realization. Most of the time we don’t really make seeking pleasure complicated after all. Instead I propose that we avoid the very complications that produce the state.

Dear reader be reassured that I have my thoughts about the questions in the opener. The questions and my solutions to them weren’t the point of this exercise, only the method. And this exercise was purely meditative. Imagine the delicious complications that arise when we enter into a philosophical discussion with someone else. Philosophy and principles of philosophy do not flourish in a vacuum. They need sounding boards and in the best cases a goalies that keeps us from scoring the easy unjustified point. I would love to hear what you came to in your meditation. Respond in the comments below.

Alternatively, a session with an APPA trained Counselor is a wonderful way to contemplate and explore these ideas. Open up all of these possibilities by Booking an appointment with Eu:PhORIC philosophical counseling today.

Think Well. Run Often. Be Happy.

-Cecil

Who Needs Philosophy?

This question is the beginning, middle, and end of any pursuit of wisdom, knowledge, happiness, or meaning. Even asking the question engages the discipline. Whether you know it or not you need and use philosophy every single day of your life. One of the many great evils of the 20th-Century was that academic philosophy became obsessed with wonky obscure questions that really had little direct effect in the common person’s life. I could wax for hours on the causes and justifications for this fixation but to no real end.

The good news is that once every few centuries someone comes around and shakes the tree of the academy to loosen out all of the dross. And when that happens we philosophers remember why we all started our love of the greatest discipline in the first place. Philosophy makes people happy. Doing it, talking about it, sharing our findings and our failings, pondering the nature of beauty, and love, and ethics, and justice makes folks better. Philosophy is intrinsically valuable. While it’s not easy for everyone to learn, I am of the opinion and have evidence, with over 10-years of personal experience teaching philosophy at community college and at public high schools, that with the right teacher and philosopher anyone can do philosophy and thereby make their life better.

So I love this question and I believe that the answer is that we all do at different times in our lives. If its dealing with loss, or responsibility, or obligation. Thinking about what makes life worth living and being able to justify why. The skills that I have learned in my philosophical training have no limits on the good that they have provided in my life. My students regularly reach out to me to share how my seemingly impractical subject has improved their lives, college experiences, love lives, sense of citizenship and self, career and beyond.

Philosophical counseling with an APPA trained therapist is one way to approach philosophical thinking for those who missed the initiation of the academy. I would love to speak with you one-on-one about how philosophy can help you contextualize the world and your problems in it, and start you on the path of self-mastery and eventually the happiest version of yourself. The journey to self discovery starts with an intention to walk it, and as Siddartha would argue a single step.

Take that step and BOOK a session today.

-Think Well. Run Often. Be Happy.

Cecil