Your Philosophy is Shrinking Your Life (Here’s How to Expand It)

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I’ve long championed this notion: step one: choose your philosophy (decide who you want to be), step two: live by it (act as that person immediately).

While I still subscribe to that mantra, something about the first step always felt a bit off. Can we truly “decide” our way into a meaningful life - or is there something wilder at play?

While I strongly believe that we have a choice about our philosophies, treating them like a mere individual decision also doesn’t seem quite right.

This piece is my attempt to dissect that tension.

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We cannot not have a philosophy. Every breath, choice, and conversation is shaped by a worldview - a web of assumptions about what matters, what’s real, and who gets to decide. While many believe philosophies are abstract ideas confined to textbooks: they are not. They are invisible threads that shape our relationships (to ourselves, the cosmos, humans and more-than-humans).

“In one sense philosophy does nothing. It merely satisfies the entirely impractical craving to probe and adjust ideas which have been found adequate each in its special sphere of use. In the same way the ocean tides do nothing. Twice daily they beat upon the cliffs of continents and then retire. But have patience and look deeper; and you find that in the end whole continents of thought have been submerged by philosophic tides, and have been rebuilt in the depths awaiting emergence. The fate of humanity depends upon the ultimate continental faith by which it shapes its action, and this faith is in the end shaped by philosophy.” Alfred North Whitehead

Our philosophies are the blueprints for our world-making.

One of the biggest flaw in our current philosophy in our Western, educated, industrialized, rich and democratic (WEIRD) world is the mechanization of everything, which frames Earth as a resource, time as a commodity, and growth as an infinite upward line, resulting in capitalism’s extractive logic. In contrast to that, most Indigenous cosmologies, root themselves in circular time and reciprocal kinship with land. While we focus on the parts, many others focus on their relationships.

The way most of us treat philosophy is like a pair of glasses we forget we’re wearing. We assume reality is out there, neutral and fixed, rather than a collaborative performance. When we mistake philosophy-based reality for universal laws though, we risk becoming puppets of our own paradigms.

Colonialism, patriarchy, and climate collapse aren’t just historical events; they’re the fruits of philosophies that severed humans from nature, women from power, and progress from responsibility.

This is why reimagining philosophy isn’t just an intellectual exercise. It’s an act of survival. If a philosophy can calcify into oppression, it can also be composted into liberation. We are always world-ing - breathing life into certain stories while starving others. A philosophy isn’t a mirror reflecting reality, but more like a mycelial network weaving reality into being.

The question isn’t whether you have a philosophy. It’s whether we’re attending to it - or letting it attend to us.

The Problem with Having a Philosophy

Photo by Billie on Unsplash

I used to collect philosophies. I’d pocket them, polish them, and arrange them on a mental shelf. Look at me, I’d think, so nuanced, so wise. Yet, as Sadhguru says

“The moment you get identified with your limited ideas of morality you become completely twisted. Your intellect functions around these identifications in such a way that you never see the world as it is. If you want an element of spirituality to enter your life, the first thing you must do is drop these rigid ideas of virtue and vice, and learn to look at life just the way it is.”

I can’t collect philosophies. In fact, the whole idea of having a philosophy isn’t great.

While I talk a lot about the importance of having a philosophy, there is a pitfall in having one, if we are not careful in how we tend to them.

To have a philosophy is to own a philosophy. There is no reciprocal relationality in having something. It’s mere extraction, one sided.

Treating philosophy as a thing to have turns it into a static set of beliefs, axioms, or answers. It reduces the vast complexity of a philosophy to a trophy, a commodity, or worse, a cage. We’ve been taught to think of philosophies as finished products: Nietzsche’s will-to-power, Descartes’ cogito, Kant’s categorical imperative.

But philosophy isn’t a noun. It’s a verb. A process. A living being.

Philosophies are actual occasions - with their own agency. Your philosophy isn’t a puppet you control, it’s a presence you collaborate with. It evolves as you meet new people, read new books, or walk through a forest and feel your separateness dissolve. The idea of being in full control stems from the very philosophy many of us in the WEIRD world grew accustomed to.

These words that you are reading are co-created with a machine that grew into what it is by thousand, millions of minds and people. These words, these thoughts wouldn’t exist without it. They present “my” philosophy - which truly does not belong to me.

Alfred North Whitehead once wrote,

“The ultimate metaphysical ground is the creative advance into novelty.”

For Whitehead, reality isn’t made of static things but of events - interwoven processes in perpetual becoming. A rock isn’t just a rock; it’s a mingling of minerals, a conversation with erosion, a momentary shape in geologic time. You aren’t just you, you’re a flow of cells, memories, and relationships, reinventing yourself with every breath.

The eco-phenomenologist David Abram urges us to see the world not as a collection of objects but as a community of subjects. In The Spell of the Sensuous, he writes that rocks, rivers, and ravens are not passive resources but active participants in the more-than-human world. To Abram, perception itself is a dialogue: the wind speaks through chimes; the soil remembers in the scent of rain.

If the inanimate world is animate, why would our philosophies be any different?

A living philosophy isn’t a monologue - it’s a polyphonic conversation. It listens as much as it speaks. It’s accountable to the communities (human and otherwise) it impacts.

Photo by David Clode on Unsplash

To have a philosophy, then, is to host a lichen: part you, part other, wholly intra-dependent.

This shifts philosophy from a noun to a gerund: not truth but truthing, not being but becoming.

When we fixate on philosophies as rigid systems, we mirror what Carol Dweck calls a fixed mindset: the belief that intelligence, talent, or identity are unchangeable. A fixed mindset fears failure, a growth mindset thrives on it. Similarly, a fixed philosophy resists ambiguity, contradictions, and growth. For example, a student with a fixed mindset avoids challenges, fearing they’ll expose inadequacy. A growth-minded student leans into struggle, seeing it as a catalyst. A living philosophy then doesn’t fear contradictions - it feeds on them. When your beliefs clash (for example “I value sustainability, but I drive a gas car”), the tension isn’t a failure, it’s fertile ground.

Your philosophy is not something you possess. It’s a relationship you tend. Philosophies are ecosystems - dynamic, interdependent, and alive.

If we our philosophies are living beings that we relate to,, how do we care for a philosophy the way we’d care for a forest, a friend, or a lover?

Philosophy as a Living Being

So what if we imagine our philosophy as a creature. What does it eat? How does it move? What environments help it thrive? How do we nurture a philosophy that’s alive?

1. Embrace unknowing as a skill: Let go of the need for answers. David Abram suggests that mystery isn’t a problem to solve but a relationship to deepen. Spend time in places that humble you: old-growth forests, uncomfortable discussions, unknown places.

2. Practice reciprocity: Care is cyclical. If your philosophy sustains you, ask: What sustains it? Feed it diverse voices. Compost outdated ideas. Thank the thinkers who nourish you, thank the microbes that nourish them.

3. Listen deeply: “Sit, be still, and listen” Rumi. Engage with the world and those around you with heightened attention and empathy. Move beyond surface-level hearing to truly understand the nuances and emotions behind words and actions. True listening is the deepest act of care.

4. Rewild your mind: Industrial agriculture monocrops; a living philosophy polycrops. Let your philosophy get messy. Read poetry at the edges of your comfort zone. Talk to someone whose beliefs terrify you. Cross-pollinate disciplines.

5. Fail forward: Dweck’s mantra is “Not yet.” When our philosophy stumbles (it will), we don’t need to discard it - we can diagnose it. Did it become too rigid? Too detached from the body? Failure is data. Compost it. Grow anew.

Philosophies are not held. They hold. They cradle us in moments of doubt and nudge us toward certain choices. To tend a living philosophy is to acknowledge this reciprocity - to kneel in the soil of our beliefs and ask, “What do you need to thrive?”

This doesn’t mean surrendering agency. It means recognizing that agency is always shared. Just as a gardener collaborates with sunlight, soil, and seasons, we collaborate with the philosophies that root us. Sometimes they surprise us. Sometimes they wound us. Sometimes they compost into something new. But they are never passive.

So instead of asking “What’s my philosophy?”, we can ask instead: “How is my philosophy living through me? What worlds is it building? What worlds is it burning?”

In the end, we are not the authors of our philosophies. We are their habitats. And a habitat is never owned. It’s borrowed, nurtured, and someday returned - transformed by giving and receiving.

Photo by Jeremy Thomas on Unsplash

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