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Before I lay out my philosophy, I want to emphasize that what I have written is only a personal opinion. I am not proposing that my view is more accurate than someone else’s; I cannot prove that what I say is true. I do not aspire to persuade others to act in accordance with my principles. I am simply describing what I have learned from my existence so far.

There are 6 things in life that I consider to be 'true'. They constitute my premises; they are:

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1. I am self-conscious.

2. I exist inside a human body.

3. My body seems to be driven to survive and procreate.

4. I am going to die at some point in time and when I do, it will be the end of it all for me.

5. There is no God or other spirit whom I can hold on to for guidance; hence I am alone, like every other self-conscious being.

6. One day, our physical universe will collapse and all objects and life forms in it will be terminated.

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For me, it is necessary to draw the consequences of these 6 ‘facts’ right to the end. Everyone I know seems unwilling to confront these issues full on. Perhaps they are afraid of finding something they do not like. In any case, it is obvious that they try to escape this objective reality.

I want to be coherent. By that, I mean that I do not want to escape reality by deceiving myself into thinking that what I do matters. Being coherent means being vividly and continuously aware of the 6 points mentioned above. When that happens, you realise that you are alone in this temporary and futile existence. At the same time, you become free because you understand that your life is what you make of it. You feel no longer obliged to act the way other people want you to act. You choose your own path.

I start with the assumption that life is what you make of it. To be coherent, you cannot find legitimate excuses or reasons for your behaviour, whether they lead to ‘good’ actions or not. You cannot say: ‘I won't bother working hard because all my friends aren’t either, I know I’m useless anyway, and it’s not my fault if I’m lazy, nature made me that way’. Or ‘I must get this job done because I have to give a good impression.’

There is nobody other than yourself who ultimately determines your action. I acknowledge that there are instinctive drives that tell you when you are hungry, horny, sleepy etc..., but at the end of the day, you still choose how you react to these feelings, even if they sometimes appear to offer no practical way out.

So you are alone with your decisions in this absurd universe. This is what makes you free. But this freedom comes at a price. Because you are free, you are also responsible for your decisions. I find that human beings cannot cope with this responsibility and the anxiety that accompanies it, so they hide in familiar and mundane territory: TV, work, shiny cars, alcohol, family, or whatever impels them to continue living.

Why are you responsible for your decisions? Because you choose to be as soon as you unknowingly make the decision to live. By living, you are in effect vowing to yourself that you want to accomplish things in life. In other words, values are attached to your life, whether you like it or not. Even if what you want to accomplish is nothing, that in itself is a goal, and hence a value. You cannot say ‘ok then, my aim is NOT to be responsible in my life’ since you are being responsible to your aim in making that assertion, and that is contradictory and therefore incoherent.

In order to be wholly happy, you have to accept that you are alone, free, and thus inevitably responsible for yourself in this meaningless world.

As soon as you become truly self-conscious of your freedom, solitude, and futility, you are struck by a terrible feeling of anguish. At this stage, you have opened up to the possibility of becoming coherent.

Now, what does a coherent person actually do in life? There are 3 possible paths. For one, he can decide to kill himself because by doing so, he will have solved the problem by removing it altogether. It is a very neat solution.

I am interested to know whether there are other solutions. Is it possible to live life and be coherent at the same time? I have had many sleepless nights pondering deeply on this question. I think I have found 2 other solutions.

Coherence is a state of mind (being self-conscious of things), so in theory, it does not matter what a coherent person does in life, as long as he is constantly aware of his true situation in the world. However, I am finding it hard to imagine how a coherent person can do anything in life, knowing that whatever he does has no objective meaning. I mean how can you pursue an activity (say going to work everyday from 9am-5pm) and yet recognise that it has no ultimate purpose? At first, I thought that the only way you can do that is by convincing yourself that what you do has a purpose, but the problem is that in "reality", whatever you choose to do cannot have a rational purpose. By persuading yourself that what you do is meaningful, you are deceiving yourself and are therefore incoherent. So that is not a solution for me.

One way to resolve the issue would be to never discover the meaninglessness of the universe in the first place (e.g. children). However, I am not a child anymore so that does not help me.

Then I realised that a coherent being can exist as long as he becomes genuinely indifferent to everything, even his own death. By not caring about anything in the world, you are detaching all your personal values so you cease to be responsible for your actions (though you still are for your decisions). You become coherent. However, is this attitude really possible to achieve in life? I have read Camus' The Stranger, and the protagonist appears to act without any concern to anything, but that is fiction, not reality. I have never met anybody like that in real life.

I used to be stuck at that point. Are there any other coherent answers? Other people have proposed alternative solutions such as relying on creativity and art to keep you going, or loving other individuals, but on reflection these answers seem unsatisfactory to me because they are just other forms of escapism.

Then, I came up with another theoretical solution for coherent living. The argument goes like this: all values, goals, and actions have something in common. They all endorse freedom itself. People create values, and when they do, they are necessarily free to choose which values to embrace. So no matter what is chosen in the end, freedom is respected. If a person who conceives values does not approve of freedom, he is contradicting himself, whether aware of it (hypocrisy) or not (foolishness). He is denying his own free situation.

So freedom is the origin of all values. To commit to anything necessarily entails committing to freedom. In light of this, a human being would be coherent if he spent the whole of his existence fighting to free other human beings, treating all of them as equal in their right to freedom. Why is that so? Because a coherent being is not only conscious of himself but also of other beings (inevitably). Such an empathetic being would do everything in his capacity to show others that they are really free, without ever enforcing any values on them, instead letting them choose their own. He would be coherent because he would be consistent with his own free situation.

In order to be free in the practical sense, you must have all your basic needs met (i.e. food, warmth, sleep) so that you can make your own clear-headed choices. Therefore, a coherent person would help every being he can imagine whose basic needs are not met, until all of them are (arguably an impossible task in a human lifespan, but the plausibility of the goal is not the issue). What such an individual would actually do in life is a matter of personal taste. Some may want to work for peace-keeping organisations, others may prefer to raise money for charity. There is no right way. Only the attitude is relevant. As long as such a person is consistently aware that what he does has no actual significance and that all his efforts are in vain, then he would be coherent.

As in the second solution of indifference, the big problem I have is knowing whether it is possible to live like that. How can you devote your entire life to freeing others, knowing that nothing will come of it? It seems unbearably depressing.

I want to emphasize again that I am not saying that I think human beings should be coherent. My philosophy makes no moral judgements. I am just explaining what a coherent individual would do under my personal definition of coherence.

Having said all that, I have recently felt more positive about my outlook after discerning that the 6 ‘facts' stated at the beginning are not so horrifying after all. I mean if they were, their opposites would be wonderful facts, right? For example, the opposite of point 4 (death at one point in time) would be life at every point in time (i.e. living eternally). But would living forever really make your life meaningful? Think about it, if you lived forever, then nothing would matter either (since nothing would be important anymore). And the opposite of point 5 would be the existence of a God, but if there was such a God, then you would not be free anymore as you would have to comply with his wishes. Nonetheless, I sometimes think that even if we cannot imagine a better world than ours, it does not necessarily make our world meaningful.

A compromise might be to live life without ever taking it too seriously and without inflicting your own values on others. How you define 'too seriously' is a moot point. Some days, I am happy to adopt such a positive attitude to life, but most of the time, I am not. I am beginning to feel that no compromise can ever be satisfactory to me. I am still searching for an answer, but times are hard. The ultimate conclusion to my philosophy is that nothing really matters, that nothing has any real importance. And if you think about it, if nothing really matters, then it does not matter whether you are coherent or not, so why bother trying to be? I understand that, but for some reason, I cannot accept it. It is like there is some part of me that will always want answers. All I know for now is that I am what I make of myself.

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If you have any comments, questions, or criticism about my philosophy, please visit the forum and post a message.

I have a longer, more detailed and structured account of my philosophy. The above is just a summary of the main ideas in it. Feel free to contact me if you are interested in this detailed version