Subjects I Refuse to Write About

Characterization

Examples: How to find identity, purpose, and people you resonate with

These are too personal for high-level advice. You must define them yourself. Additionally, these will evolve over time as you do. Not exactly a helpful answer, I know, but I can’t tell you what matters to you or how to pursue that. It’s up to you. And you will spend the rest of your live revising your answer.

Pseudo-Dilemmas

Examples: “Is water wet?”, “Can you love two people at once?”, “Is [x] real?”, “Is a hotdog a sandwich?”

Semantics disguised as questions. They pretend to be deep but reveal and serve nothing. Furthermore, the Codex is focused on practical, everyday philosophical problems, not abstract bullshit that serves no purpose. If you want to jerk off your “intellect” on stuff that literally does not matter, this is not the place.

Cynicism

Examples: Why people suck, why society is doomed, why you will never find true love

Venting isn’t philosophy. Anger without direction serves no purpose. Process your goddamn emotions. Furthermore; people do suck, but you still need them, and still want to connect with them, and some people probably suck less than others. Society is not doomed; we have overcome major catastrophies over and over again, one way or another, albeit not always comfortably, and every single generation without exception believed they were the last. And belief in “true” love is what causes the disappointment of it not existing; be realistic about your relationships. Cynicism often has a source, but 1) it’s source isn’t always rational, but emotional, usually from biased sources, and 2) cynicism solves literally nothing, making it self fulfilling.

Nostalgia

Examples: Things were better back then, we’ve lost our way, the golden age of [x]

Every generation says this about the one before it. You’re comparing your simple, biased-ly remembered earlier life to your current, complex, and uncertain adult problems, so they’re not even fair to compare. Memory doesn’t remember the parts that sucked. Even if it does, you know it ended and how it ended, so there’s nothing left to be anxious about. Yeah, some things genuinely were better, but most of nostalgia is simply just grief. Everyone experiences missing things. That doesn’t mean the time it happened in is objectively better than now.

“Psychology”

Examples: Attachment styles, extreme behavior, personality tests

For one, this is mostly bullshit because it doesn’t factor in the complexity and inconsistency of actual human psychology. Two, frameworks become cages when people use them to justify stagnation. Three, while I have a lot of psychological knowledge, I’m not a therapist or a trained psychologist. This is not the place to come to for that stuff, I’m not qualified. I’m a philosopher, first and foremost.

Abstractions

Examples: Justice, equity, utopia, moral purity

You could write about these topics forever and still never scratch the surface. Additionally, they are heavily context-dependent and opinionated. We will never have completely fair, just, or perfect systems, and writing about these topics assuming we can is unrealistic. Obviously, things can and need to improve at the societal level, but anyone telling you they’ve figured out the absolute best way to do that is lying to you or to themselves.

Moral Performance

Examples: How to be good, how to be liked, how to win approval

Answer: Be authentic and this shit doesn’t matter anymore. Stop living your life as if others experience it more than you do. We all want to be good and to be liked and to win approval, yes, but treating those desires as the top priority means you live your entire life subservient to what other people expect and want from you. If that’s truly how you want to live, that’s fine, but be honest about it, because it’s not exactly fulfilling or sustainable.

Empty Gratitude

Examples: Just be thankful/grateful, focus on the positives, it’ll work out in the end, [x] tried their best, at least [x] is better than [y]

Examples, in other words: Your pain is irrelevant, shut up. To be fair, positive and gracious thought does quite consistently improve mental health in general. However, using empty gratitude as an excuse to avoid or justify existing problems instead of working to fix them is unfair and immoral. Gratitude is useful, but it’s not a solution, and if the root problems causing gratitude to apparently be necessary are never addressed, then all it does is enable harm. You can be honest about the problems and work to solve them while simultaneously being grateful for what you have. Empty gratitude assumes you can’t, making it dangerous by enabling.

Manifestation

Examples: Just visualize it, put it into the universe, good vibes attract good things, be who you want to attract

Wanting something doesn’t guarantee it happens. This is essentially just prayer without a religion. When things go well, you credit the ritual, and when they don’t, you blame insufficient belief, so it can never be wrong. The combination of effort, luck, and circumstance produce outcomes, not intention. If visualizing worked, every anxious person would have manifested peace by now. But you cannot manifest a desired, predictable internal state onto a complicated, unpredictable external reality that you do have influence over, but not control.

Absolutes

Examples: Never do this, always do that

Life is not that simple. Nothing transcends context or the complexity of human existence. Black and white thought exists because our minds are built to process information efficiently, but if you don’t address any situation’s built-in nuance, you’re just being ignorant. To be fair, this is easier said than done, but the point is to at least try to take a step back and acknowledge that things might be a little more complicated than you’re giving them credit for.

Free Will

Examples: Do we really have free will, are we just chemical reactions, is anything a real choice, do we live in a simulation

This is interesting for anyone new to philosophy but useless outside of that. Whatever the metaphysical answer is doesn’t matter, you still feel like you have free will and nothing can change that, you still have to decide what to do, and the decision making process feels and functions the exact same way regardless of whether or not it’s actually real. Even if everything were set in stone from the beginning of time, nothing about how you feel about your life would change. You still make choices regardless. You’re always going to feel like you have free will, even if you objectively don’t, so this question is functionally pointless to your existence.