What is Philosophy for?
Hello and welcome to wild:health - philosophy for personal and planetary health. Though, by having written today’s article I might have to question that tagline.
We live in a world obsessed with quick fixes. Self-help gurus, productivity hacks, and ancient philosophies repackaged as life solutions promise happiness, success, and peace.
But what many of us painfully realize - at least after we have read the 13th self-help book without seeing any noteworthy change - that what works for one person often fails another. You’ve likely felt the frustration of adopting a proven framework - Stoicism, mindfulness, minimalism - only to find it clashes with your circumstances, values, or relationships.
The thing is, hand-me-down solutions don’t work because they ignore complexity.
They don’t adapt to the context. As I have written last week, it’s through identifying patterns and adapting those patterns in the specific context that they allow their full potential to shine. Humans are not machines, we’re dynamic ecosystems shaped by culture, biology, and lived experience. Prescribing rigid philosophies might work once, but it’s not a strategy for life.
Why your medicine isn’t mine (and that’s okay).
Maybe you have experienced the following: You stumble on an idea or philosophy that transforms your life. Naturally, you want to share it. But when others try it, they recoil. “Too abstract,” they say. “Doesn’t fit my reality.” Suddenly, your medicine feels more like a placebo - or worse, a poison.
This disconnect reveals a painful truth: Wisdom isn’t transferable. The magic of any philosophy lies not in its principles, but in the process of adapting them to our life. Whether Stoicism’s resilience or Buddhism’s non-attachment - these ideas only land when we wrestle with them, test them, and remake them through our own struggles.
Yet we keep searching for universal answers. Why? Because we’re wired to crave certainty. And quick fixes.
In doing so, we reduce philosophy to a noun - a thing to consume - rather than treating it as the verb it truly is.
But philosophy is different
I am constantly working on IPeP’s website and at the start of the website, I want to say “This is your source to a philosophical life for ….”
I want to express what philosophy - and thus the institute - is for.
I have played with:
for personal and planetary health? Yes.
For a vibrant life and planet? Yes.
For a resilient life? Yes.
For a meaningful and fulfilling life? Yes.
For a peaceful and safe life? Yes.
For an adventures and exciting life? Yes.
Yes. Yes. Yes.
What is nagging my mind here is the question what I can do to mainstream practical philosophy.
Because - and here comes the irony - I truly believe philosophy is the medicine that not only works for me.
And so what I try to do is to make a promise, like philosophy for a meaningful and fulfilling life, because this is what we are looking for as readers. We are looking for the promise, the result, the answer to what we get out of it. I definitely do. We want to know what’s in it for us.
Extractive existence
Underlying this is this hunger for quick fixes, which mirrors a broader societal notion of comfort-first and extractive thinking. We treat knowledge, ecosystems, and even ourselves as resources to mine. Capitalism’s endless growth myth or wellness culture’s obsession with optimization.
And these crises stem from the same root: unquestioned answers. We act as if we already know what the good life looks like - more wealth, more comfort, more control.
But obviously, these assumptions are part of the problem.
Philosophy is for philosophy
The process of finding is the real spiritual path.
The process of finding is life.
As Pablo Picasso said
I don’t seek, I find.
Seeking, that is starting from old stocks
and the drive to find the already known.
Finding, that is the entirely new.
All ways are open, and what is found is unknown.
It is a risk, a holy adventure.
The uncertainty of such ventures can only be taken on by those,
who feel safe in insecurity,
who are lead in uncertainty, in guidelessness,
who let them be drawn by the target
and don’t define the target themselves.”
Seeking is finding.
Philosophy is the love of wisdom. Not the ownership of it. It’s not wisdom itself.
The value of it is in the seeking, not in finding the answer.
Therefore, while I believe my medicine is not yours, I also truly believe that with philosophy it’s different.
Philosophy is not a thing, a solution or a quick-fix.
It is as a process, a verb, a way of life, an attitude. It’s a symbiosis. You don’t use it.
It is the constant search.
It is a life lived as a question.
Ancient schools like Epicureanism or Zen aren’t answers. They’re invitations to ask better questions: What does enough mean to me? How do I respond to suffering without numbing myself? What does a thriving planet require of me?
We don’t want to use hand-me-down ideas. Even of the great thinkers. I am not saying these ideas are worthless, the opposite, they are incredible valuable, but merely taking those principles as guides for a good life is insufficient. If we do that, we treat ourself as machines that are fueled by information.
The moment we stop treating philosophies as fixed doctrines and start living them as evolving practices, we grasp what philosophy is about.
So what IS philosophy for?
Philosophy’s purpose isn’t to hand us answers - it’s to teach us how to live philosophically. It guides us toward the good life, not by prescribing formulas or normative goals, but by inviting us into an unending dialogue: What does “the good life” even mean for me? For us? For a planet in crisis?
There is no ultimate answer to living a life that’s good, true, or beautiful. The answer is the act of questioning - of experimenting, reflecting, and daring to live as if the question itself matters. This might sound abstract, yet it’s the most concrete truth I’ve uncovered: To live the question is to embody the answer.
Practical philosophy is the process.
But ask someone on the street, “What’s the good life?” and they’ll likely mention comfort, love, or security - not “living philosophically.” And why would they? The phrase feels vague, even pretentious. But its ambiguity isn’t a flaw - it’s an opening. We haven’t yet built a cultural framework to articulate what it means to live this way.
That’s where the power lies. Philosophy is about becoming a philosopher in the rawest sense: someone who refuses to outsource their choices to dogma, trends, or inertia. Someone who treats every decision - what to buy, how to vote, when to forgive - as a chance to ask: What does a life well-lived demand of me here?
The meaning emerges not in definitions, but in the doing.
But what does seeking fix in a collapsing world
Collapse isn’t inevitable - it’s what happens when we stop questioning. Unchecked capitalism, toxic nationalism, and mindless consumerism result from fossilized philosophies, mistaken for laws of nature.
We cannot act wisely until we first ask, what kind of world we want.
Philosophy doesn’t excuse inaction. It demands better action. To plant a tree, found a social enterprise, boycott fast fashion, or protest injustice is to live a question: What does care require of me here?
This is why philosophy is the antithesis of navel-gazing. Philosophy is concerned with the whole. It’s not about you or the world but it’s the aspiration of aligning our daily choices with this whole that makes philosophy, well, … philosophy.
To align your daily life with something greater isn’t idealism.
It’s philosophy doing its job.
If you think that a friend or someone you know would benefit from reading this, please share.🌱🌻
Great embodiment of the turmoils and experiences we go through as we bash ourselves against the uncertainty of all experiential circumstance. We so often hope that firm fruits might fall from its branches, but there is no certainty in our lives. There is no certainty in any practical, hypothetical, or metaphysical solution.
May we skip with some sublime smile past the irony of being so certain in the uncertainty?
May we fall from the sky without care to reflect how we got so high as we imagine ourselves splattering against the fast approaching future wall of our past;
May we spend our lives searching for some possibility of meaning- knowing full well that we shall never find it- and hope nonetheless we go to the grave shouting and pleading it was ours all along.
Everybody is essentially disturbed by a constant underlying sense of anxiety and disturbance, a feeling of dissatisfaction that motivates them to go to a teacher, read a book about philosophy, believe something, or do some form of yoga.
All of these paths, methods, philosophical investigations, religious beliefs and so on are forms of seeking, grown out of this sensation, this anxiety, this disturbance. Fundamentally they are all attempts to get free of such. Indeed, all human beings are involved in this search, whether or not they are very sophisticated about, whether or not they are using specific methods of philosophy religious belief and so on.