ICMM

There is no one you can name who knows how he began to want what he now wants. People are not led by their intentions but jerked about by whims. Sometimes we make the best of fortune, but just as often fortune gets the better of us. It is shameful to drift rather than to go forward; shameful to find oneself in the midst of a whirlwind of events and ask, astonished, "How did I get here?"

Letters on Ethics

Seneca

When my daughter was in elementary school, she received a certificate that stated: I Can Manage Myself (ICMM). I recall it well because I put the same acronym on a sign above my desk. Isn't that one of the most obvious requirements of an adult, of a rational person, that they will have the capacity to manage their own lives, make plans, and follow through on them? How do we make those plans? What do we use to guide their creation? Philosophy. We need a filter, philosophy, to separate out what is irrational so that we are not wasting our lives in pursuit of the trivial. Yes, we all want to have meaningful jobs but not for the purpose of impressing our high school classmates or submitting to the will of our family.

We don't want to spend our lives buying impressive consumer goods to create the impression we are successful. We don't want to spend our lives managing impressions on Facebook while our "real" lives are in a shambles. Life is a serious business so we should do more research on how to live than on how to boil an egg or buy a pair of boots. 

Don't find yourself sitting in the middle of a room full of "whims" wondering what it was all about. Be well.