Life42- the Ultimate Answer to How to Live Your Life.
Hello and welcome to wild:heath - philosophy for personal and planetary health.
Tomorrow is my birthday. Not only in honor of my birthday, but for your own sake, for today’s essay, I suggest you grab a piece of cake and a coffee and tune into this music while reading this. I think it’s a dense read. By the way, I am not turning 42 .
It’s also not just my birthday, but it’s also been exactly a year since IPeP was officially brought into the world. And the greatest gift IPeP (and I) received for our birthday is that Leonie has joined IPeP as our first official team member 🎉. For me, this is beyond exciting. I can’t imagine a better fit. We met a year ago, and she has been a great influence on PhilosophyGyms. One thing that connects us is our mutual love for philosophy, the health of the planet, and especially turning philosophy into something that is alive - into an embodied practice of knowing, being, and acting.
Today’s essay is, in many (abstract) ways, a love letter to that vision. I hope you enjoy it, and I look forward to hearing your thoughts.
One of the most important skills is the ability to move fluidly along levels of perspective. This means that we are able to be immersed in the moment without any conscious thought - something that we experience in a flow state, for example - but also that we are able to go meta, to observe what it is we are thinking and doing.
In German, we would say that we should be able to change the height of flight, “Flughöhe ändern,” being all in, all out, or anything in between.
The quality of our lived experience greatly depends on how well we are able to do this. It also determines what sort of solutions we prefer and can perceive in the relationship crisis.
For example, a few weeks ago, I shared a map of health’s dimensions, outlining aspects like physical, emotional, spiritual, and more. That map attempted to connect personal well-being with planetary well-being, showing how each dimension sits within a larger web of interconnected realities. For instance, emotional health on an individual level is entwined with collective grief or trauma on a societal or planetary level, just as the planet’s energetic health is linked to our personal sense of vitality. I also made a disclaimer when I shared the map: (1) that it is incomplete, and it always will be. (2) that creating a map is - for better and worse - a way of worlding and (3) that maps are invitations for inquiry.
A focus on one aspect of health on the map - such as physical health - is a zoom into a smaller perspective (a lower Flughöhe) than trying to see the bigger picture and understanding all of the ways that health expresses itself. The map was an attempt to fly a little higher:
Yet, this is not as high as we can go.
An even higher Flughöhe would be to not just to map these different aspects of health, but to identify their commonalities: what do all of these different elements of health have in common. Or in other words: what are the patterns?
Because once we focus on patterns rather than the isolated elements, we can apply a relational principle across domains—translating what works well in, say, physical healing, into creative or communal healing.
Fractal patterns in complex systems
For some people it might seem like a leap to assume that there are common threads between our body’s ability to heal and, hypothetically, a group’s ability to navigate collective trauma, or even the planet’s ability to restore depleted soil. I was recently laughed at when I used the term planetary health. Though, I assume if you are reading my work, this is intuitive knowledge for you.
And your intuition is confirmed (not that it needs to be) by complex systems theory which suggests just this: that patterns in nature often repeat across multiple levels of scale, making them fractal. A fractal pattern is one that we can see recurring at the microscopic level and again at the macroscopic. Fractals imply that there are universal gestures - like cooperation, reciprocity, or feedback loops - that work similarly whether you are an individual cell, a community, or an entire ecosystem.
One vivid illustration is the way mycelium networks in forests facilitate nutrient-sharing between trees. That principle is what we can ideally mirror in our communities. By identifying that pattern, we can pivot from solely considering nutrient exchange in plants (or emotional support in humans) to thinking about what healthy exchange and reciprocity might look like in entirely different domains—such as the exchange of knowledge, creative ideas, or economic resources in a social system.
Focusing on patterns in health then may carry more mileage than fixating only on improving, say, an individual’s physical or emotional well-being.
As someone who likes to look beneath the surface, I find recurring themes - these meta-patterns - to be a helpful lens that keeps us from getting stuck in a single dimension. If I can observe a pattern in how I relate to my body, I might then wonder: how does that pattern play out in my relationships with friends, my spiritual practices, or in the political organizations I belong to?
One way to view reality is inherently fractal.
“The universe is here because of you and you are here because of it. It is ‘as above, so below’ made fractal.” Gordon White
Pattern languages
If reality is fractal, speaking a language of patterns becomes key.
On every level of scale - or on every Flughöhe - patterns can be systematically identified and used to reshape how we live.
The pioneering figure in this area was Christopher Alexander, an architect best known for his work around “pattern languages.” Alexander recognized that you could observe common design principles in geometry, structures, and living spaces across cultures and geographies that many people use to create environments that support well-being.
Silke Helfrich, whom I had the privilege of working with and whose work I highly recommend, took up a form of this practice by identifying patterns of commoning. She looked at how communities collectively manage resources, how they communicate and care for shared commons, and she distilled from these observations certain recurring principles - like transparency, reciprocity, and stewardship.
“What pattern connects the crab to the lobster and the orchid to the primrose, and all the four of them to me? And me to you?” Gregory Bateson
In many ways, every dimension of the above health map (physical, emotional, psychological, spiritual, etc.) could be looked at through a similar pattern lens.
When we approach the various dimensions of health, the question becomes less about which dimension matters most, and more about which patterns are useful within all these dimension. It becomes less about what we do and more about how we do it.
And then we can ask how is this pattern in this dimension repeated somewhere else? And what is this pattern in the first place?
Escaping scales
Often, when people find a model that appears to be successful—a new agricultural method, a more efficient organizational system, or a personal development hack - they leap to the idea of scaling.
The impulse is: “Let’s replicate this solution everywhere!” This approach can be valuable, but it sometimes devolves into a colonial mindset in which a uniform method is imposed irrespective of local contexts. Scaling becomes synonymous with trying to copy and paste a single solution across different cultures, ecosystems, or individuals.
Pattern thinking offers an alternative. Rather than replicate a specific practice from location to location, we take the guiding pattern (the essence of why that practice flourished) and adapt it in a context-specific way.
Christopher Alexander’s pattern language never claimed to provide universal building templates. Instead, he suggested that each place has unique characteristics, yet certain patterns - like the principle of comfortable transitions between indoor and outdoor spaces - proved beneficial in diverse settings. In the same spirit, we might see a microfinance program succeed in one region. Instead of scaling that exact program though, we could identify the underlying pattern: the local bridging of trust and collective responsibility. Then we adapt that pattern to a different community’s cultural norms, resource constraints, and leadership structures. It ceases to be a top-down solution which is forcibly imposed, and becomes a flexible principle that emerges out of the context and relationships.
“All advances in science are made by observing patterns, by using metaphors and formal analogies. And, if we wanted examples, we have them at the highest level: Darwin in biology, Freud in psychology and Bohr in physics spring to mind.” Iain Mc Gilchrist
Pattern language is deeply relational and context-dependent.
Philosophy as a living meta-pattern
If reality is fractal, and pattern languages offer a way to navigate its complexity, then philosophy is the act of tracing these patterns across scales - the patterning.
As Alfred North Whitehead says, philosophy isn’t a static mirror reflecting truth, but a “creative advance into novelty,” a dynamic process of becoming.
Just as a forest’s mycelial network weaves relationships between trees, philosophy weaves relationships between ideas, contexts, and scales.
Philosophy is not a fixed set of answers but a fluid practice of asking: How do the patterns here resonate elsewhere? What gestures of reciprocity, adaptation, or care repeat across time and space? It not only asks: What is the pattern here? but How does this pattern breathe? Timeless questions - What is justice? What is healing?—are not to be answered but to attune to, repeating across scales with infinite variation.
That’s why people often say that philosophy is about asking timeless questions.
Yet, it’s also asking spaceless questions.
Because it is the search for what’s beyond time and space - for the patterns. I believe it’s our inherent human condition to want to go meta. And our capacities for going meta, of increasing our Flughöhe, of going meta on meta on meta on meta… is one way of practicing philosophy.
And why do we do that? Why is that almost an urge (an urge which we confuse with scaling because of our mechanistic understanding of the world)?
Because - I believe - we have an innate urge not only to connect the whole (where we come from), but also to know the whole, to perceive it, and to find out what its ultimate pattern, like its ultimate telos (goal), might be.
Because if we were to grasp that, we would not only understand the meaning of our lives, but we would also know how to live our lives.
And, because the whole is what Timothy Morton would call a hyperobject, something which we can never fully perceive, it remains always only partial.
The answers to space-and-timeless questions can never be known.
We will never fully know the meaning of life, or how to live it.
That’s why living philosophically is - and I am using definite language here on purpose - not only the ultimate answer, but it is simultaneously the spaceless, timeless, and thus ongoing question, to how to live our lives.
If you know someone who is trying to figure out how to live their life, share this and let them know that they never will. 🌱
I take two inspirations from this text: the search for the pattern in other areas when I have found it in one area. And the hint that scaling has an interface with colonialist thinking. Thank you for sharing your thoughts!
The ultimate nature of the world and how it is spontaneously arising is inherently and tacitly obvious, if you remain in a state of total psycho-physical oneness with whatever and all that presently arises.
To remain in a state of total psycho-physical oneness with whatever and all that presently arises, you must necessarily, and always presently Realize Love-Blissful Unity with whatever and all that presently arises.
Presumed separation or total psycho-physical contraction from the world or whatever and all that is presently arising is, unfortunately, precisely the first and constant, and inherently problematic thing done by all those who make efforts to find out or to account for how the world is arising, and What Is its Ultimate nature.
Separation or total psycho-physical self-contraction is the first, and foundation gesture made by anyone who has a problem, or who is seeking, or who is making an effort to account for anything whatsoever.