Your MVP
tldr: An invitation to draft your personal “Minimum Viable Philosophy” as you get ready to start the new year.
What do you think about this whole “theory of everything” thing?
Do you find yourself looking for the answer to all the big questions?
Do you think you already have it? I know more than one person who DEFINITELY believes they have THE answer!
Do you believe your spirituality, your politics, and your ideology are just right? That everything would work better if people thought the same way you do?
We can be overly ambitious in our efforts to understand life and the world.
There is definitely a hubris to that ambition. A lack of humility before the Great Mystery of it ALL.
But under that hubris is fear.
Fear of what we can never fully know. Fear of exile from the tribe. And the fundamental fear of death that we each carry at our core.
It is this fear that leads us into the bunkers of our ideas. The rigidity of our fundamentalisms. And our own unwitting participation in the polarization that breaks societies apart. Over and over again. Throughout the world. And throughout the ages.
We kill and oppress each other because we want to take each other’s labor and each other’s land. But we will do it more viciously. We will do it more brutally. When we convince ourselves that we are fighting for an idea that is supposed to explain life, God, the world AND what happens in the after-life.
When we are existentially right and they are existentially wrong. That’s when we decide that they deserve to die.
Christian Nationalists* supporting the mass murder of Palestinian families is an immediate example of how we dehumanize the other and betray great teachings in the process.
Not the upbeat message you were expecting from me during the holiday week?
I’m just laying the groundwork here.
Now let me change the tune.
I’m writing to invite you to think about your MVP instead.
What do I mean by your MVP?
It’s a concept that I got from Peter Limberg, a practical philosopher that I absolutely love.
Your MVP is your Minimum Viable Philosophy.
If you’ve done work with me before you have heard me talk about “trojan mice.” A “trojan mouse” is the opposite of a “trojan horse.” Your trojan horse is the big strategy that you think is going to win it all. Thinking in terms of trojan mice is the opposite of that. It is a strategic approach that assumes the world is too volatile. Too uncertain. Too complex and too ambiguous (VUCA) for you to have a five year plan, or a three year plan. Or even a one year plan.
We have ten year visions and three month plans. We move strategically. In the direction that we want. One small experiment at a time.
Your Minimum Viable Philosophy is like your “trojan mouse.” It is your experimental framework for how to live a good life.
When your minimum viable philosophy meets reality you get a sense of how it works. You gather feedback from your experience interacting with others, yourself and the world. And you iterate. You learn.
Here I borrow from Peter again when he says that the idea is to “do philosophy” instead of “have a philosophy.” One must start with the practical and weave into the theoretical when required. If you start with the theoretical... you can stay in theoretical la-la-land, untethered from reality.”
In our hyper-rational, disembodied dominant culture, you can become an “artist of reason.” You can be full of ideas. But you will not be an “artist of life” (h/t Pierre Hadot via Limberg.)
We want to be artists of life. Life is a beautiful and devastating mystery. Each of our cultures is an an effort to answer the big questions:
How did we get here?
Why are we here?
And what does that mean about how we should live?
So how are you going to live?
One group of people decided that they had the answer for how all human beings should live. They used power and technology to impose a philosophy of extraction. A philosophy of consumerism. A myopic ideal of exponential growth. A philosophy that seeks to establish human dominion over the earth.
And now we are left with an existential predicament.
Now we live in the anthropocene. A dominant philosophy got so aggressive and so big that it has literally changed the climate of our planet.
So how about we get humble instead? How about we scale things down a bit?
How would we be with each other if we did not think we knew everything about how everyone should behave and be?
How about we experimented with finding the best and wisest way for each one of us to be? We try it in the real world. We see how it works. How others respond to us. How we feel about being alive. And we adjust bit by bit as we learn.
This is my last note to you in 2023. I’m inviting you to draft your personal MVP. It will be a good way to start the year. Then commit to revisiting it two or three times in 2024. See how it changes as you grow.
I’d love for you to share your MVP with me.
And I’ll share my MVP with you.
I hope you are finding joy, good company and rest. Even through these times of great unrest.
*In case it’s not obvious to you, Christian Nationalism is not the same as Christianity. In fact, it is not even consonant with it. It is an apocalyptic ideology. It is so concerned with its fantasy of what will happen at the end of the world that it is almost gleeful about seeing it all burn.
Christian Nationalism is but one example. Just like the gory bloodlust of Islamic terrorism is different from Islam. And anti-semitism is different from standing for justice against the state sponsored culling and displacement of a people.
These horrific ideologies are what happen when we think there is one story that explains everything. When we cannot truly come to terms with life and its actual terms:
That we are of the nature to grow old. And there is no way to escape growing old.
That we are of the nature to get sick. And there is no way to escape sickness.
That we are of the nature to die. And there is no way to escape death.
That all that is dear to us and everyone we love are of the nature to change. And there is no way to escape being separated from them.
That our actions are our only true belongings. We cannot escape the consequences of our actions. Our actions are the ground on which we stand.
These are the terms. This is what we got. These are the facts of life. To become wise is to find our way to come to terms with the terms. And in doing so, live a good life.
Some of the things that help us come to terms with the terms include:
An endless curiosity about Love, its expression and its Source
Slowly and gently growing our hearts to include everyone and everything inside of it. Including those who do monstrous things. Because in the end, they are just hurt and afraid.
Faith & Humility
A minimum viable philosophy to shape our commitment to right action.
Turning towards our own selves each other with supreme kindness and unbearable compassion.
These are good ways to contend with the terms. Because the terms are not going to change.