Beyond Self-Help: How to Live in a World Without Instructions

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We live in an age of aspiration without apprenticeship.

To become a Buddhist, we must do as Buddha did.
To embody yoga, we must live as the yogi lives.
To follow Christ, we must walk as Jesus walked.

In a secular world, though, few people strive to be like the Buddha or Jesus, so what are the ideals we can orient our lives around?

It sometimes feels as if we’ve collectively decided we don’t need that question answered. Instead, we scroll through Instagram and see countless mini-philosophers who invite us to live like they do. We see polished images of dreamy vacations and soft smiling selfies. We’re encouraged to emulate them, but only by replicating the result while sidestepping the messy, inconvenient work of living the thing itself. We rarely see the effort, the sweat, and the sacrifice it took to get there. And why would any of us want to share that? Effort is a hard sell.

We want the sacred without the sacrifice,
the power without the responsibility,
the temple without the vows.

But it’s not only the unwillingness to be in discomfort. It’s also that there doesn’t seem to be any lifestyle worth emulating.

Not only are we missing one grand narrative (as many people argue) - like Christianity or even Capitalism used to be for many - but we also don’t have a “person” we can look to for guidance.

Joseph Campbell noted that:

“The rise and fall of civilizations in the long, broad course of history can be seen to have been largely a function of the integrity and cogency of their supporting canons of myth; for not authority but aspiration is the motivator, builder, and transformer of civilization.”

If we neither have a grand narrative, nor a person to guide our actions, the natural conclusion seems to be that we are left to creating and becoming those narratives ourselves. As Stephen Larsen author of The Mythic Imagination: The Quest for Meaning Through Personal Mythology, puts it:

“Mythology was, perforce, collective mythology. But in our modern times these forms have relaxed their collective grip on the psyche, placing the burden for a meaningful experience of the universe on the individual person.”

For the longest time, I have searched for THAT ONE philosophy that can guide my life. After intensive search for more than a decade I noticed that maybe I was asking the wrong question.

We seem to be left with a cacophony of self-help gurus and hashtag philosophies, each peddling a different version of “the good life.”

As I wrote last week many of us tend to live as if we were the authors of our story, the masters of our universe. What Isabelle Burton calls “self-made”.

The danger of self-made philosophies

While a high sense of agency is important for our wellbeing, there is also a downside to self-making when it comes to our philosophies:

1. Alienation: Creating a philosophy is a way of worlding. If each of us creates their own philosophies, each of us creates their own world, which is not necessarily in alignment with the world of others. If we don’t remember to relate our philosophies to the world around us, we risk that our lives are incompossible, or simply out of sync with the shared reality around us. I think this is where we are mostly at at the moment.

2. Lack of enchantment: A philosophy we invent on our own lacks the power to enchant us. Mystery and wonder arise from acknowledging something beyond ourselves and by committing to something that is not us. If we create our own philosophy we lack the faith and trust in the unknown, because we’ve been the one making it.

3. Self-worship: If my personal philosophy is primarily designed to serve my own needs, it’s all too easy to tip into a kind of self-worship. I can end up placing myself at the center of the universe.

4. Lack of legacy: If my philosophy is handmade just for me, then there isn’t much to pass along. It can’t become a tradition or something meaningful for future generations because it’s too narrowly tailored.

5. Blind spots remain hidden: The philosophy I construct by myself can’t easily challenge me in areas I’m unconscious of. Those blind spots remain invisible if I’ve tailored everything around my own perspective.

So where does that leave us? If there’s no single story to follow, no guru to mimic, how do we know how to live?

Neo-religion?

Photo by Ian Sanderson on Unsplash

1. We can live philosophically by living into the question of how to live. The question of how to live is the answer responding to itself.
To live philosophically is not to arrive at answers but to dwell in the questions themselves. Rilke once urged us to “love the questions,” to let them unravel us, because the act of questioning is where meaning is forged. This is the apprenticeship of uncertainty. Camus, in The Myth of Sisyphus, framed the absurd hero as one who embraces the futility of seeking final answers, yet eventually finds purpose in the climb itself. If there is a lack of blueprints, living into the question is a rebellion - a refusal to reduce existence to a checklist. To ask “how should I live?” is already to begin answering it: by staying awake, by refusing the anesthetic of easy dogma. The question is the practice.

2. To overcome the self-centeredness, we can live in dialogue with others-human and more-than-human. By checking that our philosophy is ecological-that it is in response to reality (our ecos), as to our best knowledge.
Martin Buber wrote that all life is encounter, an “I-Thou” reciprocity that dissolves the illusion of separateness. To craft a philosophy that’s ecological means listening to rivers, forests, and crows as collaborators. If our philosophies don’t make room for the mourning of extinct species or the rights of mountains, they are solipsisms in disguise. To live dialogically is to let the world interrogate us, to let our truths be unsettled by the rustle of leaves or a squirrel getting in our way. When we live in conversation - with friends, strangers, forests, rivers - we ground our ideas in something beyond ourselves, we stop worshiping our own needs.

3. As Küpers (2020) argues, we must leave the Anthropocene and enter the Ecocene. If there is no person to emulate, maybe we can emulate Life itself in all its various forms. That means we can learn from ecosystems - from a landscape as much as from the sparrow. How do these other beings live their lives?
The Ecocene demands the termination of human exceptionalism. In the Ecocene, all beings frogs, mosquitos and humans equally matter. Life expresses itself in a multitude of forms, if we let go of the idea that we are better than the other forms of life, we can start looking for other sources for inspiration. We can biomimic not just designs, but make it a spiritual practice: What if we stopped trying to be Buddha or Jesus, and started learning from the crow outside our window? From the way roots share nutrients through fungal networks? From the patience of mountains? What would it mean to emulate not a person, but a prairie? To live as ecosystems do: interdependent, adaptive, rooted in reciprocity?

4. Enchantment can come from Life itself.
By apprenticing in Life itself, we commit to something that is beyond ourselves, a covenant that might involve discomfort and surrender - the kind of sacred friction that polishes away our illusions of control and thus makes room for enchantment. To apprentice to Life is to trade self-made philosophies for a participatory process.

There is so much beauty in devoting one’s life to something beyond oneself. Emulating the lifestyle of great wisdom holders can fill our lives with the meaning so many of us lack. At the same time, reviving devotion to individual figures - with all the baggage of hierarchy and dogma that often entails - feels out of step with the fragmented, pluralistic spirit of our times. As Bron Taylor argues in Dark Green Religion, we are witnessing a shift toward a spirituality that venerates not gods or gurus, but the Earth itself - a religion of nature where rivers, forests, and fungi become our teachers and temples. Every leaf, every beetle, can be a scripture waiting to be read.

“Dark green religion is generally deep ecological, biocentric, or ecocentric, considering all species to be intrinsically valuable, that is, valuable apart from their usefulness to human beings. Commonly, dark green religious and moral sentiments are embedded in worldviews and narratives that are believed to cohere with science - but they are also often grounded in mystical or intuitive knowledge that is beyond the reach of scientific method.” Bron Taylor

To apprentice ourselves to ecosystems is to trade the brittle certainty of self-made philosophies for the fluid wisdom of life’s patterns.

So where does this leave us? Without gurus, without grand narratives, but not necessarily without guidance.

What if the world itself is our sutra, our sermon, our syllabus?

As Thich Nhat Hanh said

“The Next Buddha will be a Sangha.”

What if the sangha is more-than-human?

What if we find holiness in composting, wonder in weeds, and ethics in the way rain nourishes both the just and the unjust? What if we let the crow’s caw disrupt our solipsism, and to let the prairie teach us about resilience?

Perhaps this is the only lifestyle worth emulating.

A warning

Photo by Ch Photography on Unsplash

As Ken Wilber points out, a worship for the more-than-human or GAIA (as he says in his book Radical Wholeness) resembles the worship for Jesus. That is,

“each of them is taken to be a real, 3rd-person, objective description of reality (whether Jesus or Gaia); they both take it to be the most true and most important reality that there is; they both believe that if their own ultimate concern is not taken seriously, then all of humanity itself will suffer enormously and likely even die; they both believe that people can deviate from this ultimate concern or they can obediently follow it and thus prevent disaster, and that this reality is the source of their ultimate concern.”

Wilber’s caution here is important: even our noblest attempts to venerate more-than-humans risk calcifying into dogma or another absolutized grand narrative that demands allegiance rather than dialogue. If this were to become a rigid orthodoxy - nature as the answer rather than a prompt to ask better questions - we might risk repeating the same traps of hierarchy and exclusion we sought to escape.

Yet this need not be a dead end. We can hold ecologies with open minds, hearts and hands and commit deeply to Life itself while remaining skeptically attuned to the limitations of our own frameworks. What if the Ecocene is not a fixed destination but an ongoing negotiation, a collaborative improvisation with Life itself?

Romanticizing nature as an unchanging sacred unity risks regressing to a pre-modern naiveté, ignoring many of the complexities. True apprenticeship demands we face nature’s raw, unvarnished truths - which includes us, as part of nature. we are also an expression of Life. so are our smartphones and buildings. - without collapsing into either sentimentalism or nihilism.

We might worship ecosystems, while also laughing at the absurdity of mosquitoes lecturing us on ethics. We can commit to composting as a daily sacrament and be annoyed by the flies the compost attracts.

In the end, the apprenticeship to Life asks us to relinquish the need for a finished philosophy. There is no answer to how we should live - only an ever-deepening question.

The danger of dogma remains, yes. But to live as apprentices is to accept that we will falter, that our philosophies will be flawed. Yet in that surrender, we might find something more enduring than self-made certainty: the ragged, glorious work of becoming a life-long student in a world that never stops teaching.

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