The only personal philosophy worth thinking about is a “philosophy for the future.” In the time given to us on this earth, how should we live and what should we do? This we have to decide. The future is all there is; the past is done and we can do nothing to change it; the present flits by as we stand around contemplating our fate. The past leaves an unavoidable deterministic legacy, but we aren’t required to accept it in its entirety. We can’t go back and change history and how it affects us, but we can alter our path as we move forward. Choosing what to do in life is our essential freedom, but just the possession of this option can be overpowering and leave us frozen in anxiety. Are we truly condemned to be free, as Jean-Paul Sartre tells us? The idea of experiencing life, of having to decide how to live, as opposed to not existing at all, is both astonishing and deeply frightening. We can just trundle on and let the legacy of history and popular culture take us where it will; we can cave into the determinism of history and go with the flow. This is a choice. But we can also stand up and decide for ourselves what our future will be. Don't let your mistakes of the past overwhelm you; don't let the evil eye of others deter you from your chosen path. The future is your rose for the picking, but watch out for the thorns. Take lessons from history but don’t let it rule your life. Strike out and take control.
These sentiments define the nature of the "existential" choice on how to lead our lives, one that inevitably involves us in a variety of either/or decisions, such as letting others choose for us instead of doing it ourselves, or to seek material wealth as opposed to goals that bring meaning to life but not necessarily as much money for buying things. In recent history most citizens of affluent, industrialized countries have chosen a materialist path, and most spend the better part of their waking hours getting a living and spending it. The undeniable wonders of modern material progress endow us with comfortable, pleasurable, healthy, and interesting lives. Acquiring material possessions is fun, and in the process all of us together cause the economy tick along, creating employment and giving us all something to do.
While the immediate future will no doubt look much like the past, a slow but steady trend in human pursuits is taking us beyond a purely materialist existence. Even today not everyone follows strictly economic dreams. Some of us look outside of immediate possessive concerns to seek our meaning in life. Post-material pursuits take us beyond private hedonistic desires, such as the enjoying of a scoop of French vanilla ice cream, buying a new iPad, taking a cruise to the Caribbean, driving a Porsche, or wearing a brand new, fashionable pair of soccer shoes to practice. A post-materialist soccer player instead would want to advance the quality of game itself (as a soccer referee might), or the success of a particular team (as a cooperating team member would), and would not solely focus on obtaining personal glory or the opportunity to wear fancy soccer clothing or to drive a fancy car to practice. Post-materialist soccer would be valued for its own sake, not just for the immediate private pleasure the playing of it brings. In a similar vein, one can value for its own sake photographing beautiful landscapes, writing about philosophy, advocating for gun rights, seeking governmental limits on climate change, researching the causes of cancer, fixing and extending the life of an aging clothes dryer, putting a new roof on an older architecturally interesting house, creating a new microbrew, roasting a new variety of coffee, acting in a play by Oscar Wilde, or producing leafy green vegetables on Cairo, Egypt’s rooftops to increase local family incomes, create green space in a city without much, and expand the supply of nutritional foods available to Cairenes.
To value post-materially is to possess a deep desire that some activity or being out in the world exists and flourishes into the future. True love is post-material and takes us outside strict self-concern, but pure lust is self-oriented and focuses on satisfying pleasurable desires. There is nothing wrong with lust and pleasure, but we humans also express passionate attachments to activities and beings outside of our personal skins. Only in a state of non-possessive, other-orientation do we forget our ego and experience the wonders of the world as they stand for themselves. We can experience beings and objects as something over which we desire power and control, or we can appreciate them transcendently as free and independent with a physical path of their own in time and space or virtually in human thought and sensibilities. We can enjoy the continued existence of an ancient and beautiful musical instrument, such as a Stradivarius violin or a Guarneri cello, and the continued presence and performance of beautiful music that can be understood only in the human mind, and we can do this without personal possession or control. The same is the case for colorful wildflower-laden subalpine meadows, world series baseball games, great works of philosophy, well tended gardens, Shakespearian plays, French impressionist paintings, the architectural wonders of a Barcelona, the military precision of troops in formation led by the tunes of a marching band, jazz performances in the bars of New Orleans, or a stable climate free of greenhouse gas perils.
For post-materialists, experiences stand above consumer possessions in importance. Possessions are necessary to life, but it’s experiences that count for life’s greatest satisfactions. Post-materialism takes us beyond our strictly personal interests toward a more open and less self-conscious connection with the larger world. We will always worry about our own, private well-being, but our new-found post-materialist values can move us to look outward beyond our personal skin toward the amazements of existence as such. The idea of experiencing life, as opposed to not existing at all, is both astonishing and deeply frightening as already noted, but can foster in us a sense of wonder and cause us to engage in care for all that we love, and, in particular for the Earth itself, the source of our being.
All this sounds great, even utopian, as an offering of a better future for anyone disenchanted with modern life, but I am getting ahead of myself. Post-materialism as a trend has only just begun with barely perceptible baby-steps. None of us will become full-fledged post-materialists overnight. We need to understand the importance of our materialist ways first, and then we can look into the meaning and nature of slowly rising and not much noticed post-materialist practices in the midst of our material affluence. What we will see in this exercise is that philosophy truly matters. If our philosophical values slowly but inexorably change over time, the way we live, and the impact we have on the world around us, will also change. By looking at trends in the values we possess, we can gain insights into the direction we are headed.
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