How to Live
or, Discovering a Way to Live Well
Resources & Ideas
collected & curated
by Jared Updike
This Brain is an attempt to “gather all the good and true principles in the world and treasure them up.” It is not an attempt to be original nor to claim exclusive access to Truth.
This is not a small task, and hopefully I will learn much along the way. Think of this like a Commonplace Book where I can place excerpts—but I hope I can also summarize useful bits so that reading the Notes for this Brain may someday be more useful than the sum of the parts (and save you the time of having to read dozens of books, blogs and long essays?) See The Open Book of Wisdom and The Boundary Project.
In Stages of Faith, James W. Fowler talks about deconstructing faith and then building it back up again. I thought it would be a good exercise to see how far I've come on my own journey of trying to learn how to live without being spoon-fed someone else's dogma.
This Brain also advocates Rationality, a framework wherein one learns How to Avoid Being Conned, especially by oneself.
Finally, Rationality, or the life of the mind, is not enough to live the good life. One must set one's house in order. One must exercise one's body. One must live the golden rule and lift others, and one must seek out beauty to nourish the soul or die spiritually.
Hopefully these principles help build habits that allow one to live a life of virtue, Aristotle's view of virtue: structuring one's life so that one's instinctive responses line up with one's reflective commitments. That is the good life. That is all that one can ask for.
Caveat lector. You may disagree with many things in this Brain. Please feel free to make your own Brain, blog, book, or website. Or let me know how it could be better, with evidence to back it up.