We look to philosophers as some sort of advanced thinker, someone who can look at life in the most developed of ways, exploring through study and cause.  A philosopher really is just a person who thinks about life in ways that the average individual does not care to even interpret.  Most people are just happy to delve into the simplicity of life without needing to venture too far into thinking outside of the box.  They are happy with the popular and simple everyday surface events.   Not choosing to look further into themselves for fear of not fitting in or that they might be leading away from the familiar socially accepted path of experiences.  Maybe life is already too consuming on their thoughts, with how they are going to get through the day, let alone to think about why it all exists in the first place.

Leave thinking to the experts, as they might say, for the fact that thinking becomes a job and not a desire of an individual to find purpose and meaning.  We leave our thinking to people who go to university to study how to think and theorize in certain directions and fields, always having a purpose in mind.  There are people who think about creation of life in science, only choosing to look at life through a microscope or through mathematical equations.  Then there are people who think only within psychiatry, choosing only to look at the thinking patterns of people and how they cope with life through their emotions.  There are even people who only care to think about systems and ways to make money in a world that is so limited physically, based on the freedom that money is said to give.  This is of course the most popular of all and people have become obsessed with money and leading their life on consumerism and meaningless material possessions that only hold interest for a small amount of their time. 

Life has become based on what we have rather than what we think and many times we are faced with being dragged into depression and total denial of the fact that we are not happy with all that we have achieved for ourselves, not only as individual people but also to the way we choose to live life only based on surface material possessions and simpleton thinking patterns.  Then when it comes to having to think for ourselves and find a way out of sublime reality, we turn to people who are experts in thinking to do it all for us.  We ask for answers to why we feel so unsatisfied with life through only seeing it based on materiality.  Surely there is more than just this daily hum drum and constant need to have more and more?

When all is questioned and life is truly realized, it does not matter how many experts there are on one position of life, it will not matter how many people tell us their own reason for living, the only answer will come from having to think for ourselves and to make a meaning for our own life, purely based on own reasoning and thought.  A philosopher should not be a job, or a master of thought and thinking, who sits on a throne telling their followers how to think and how life should be perceived.  They should be seen as an interesting creative person who has the ability to perceive life in a new and interesting way, taken on by others as just another person who has a different direction and viewpoint on life. 

This is the defining factor of life that really eats the soul out of all that is meaningful, and that is consumerist popularity, a world defined on people taking on the beliefs of others as their own without bothering to think for themselves and to even care to take meaning for their own life within their own hands.   It is far easier to be told what to do than to even think about what might be possible.  We conform to this military mentality from birth, being taught that listening to what we are being told is the way of life.  All know the extent that such methods of thinking move to.  They become a noose around our necks rather than a protector for our survival.  Creativity is pushed out of the door, only allowing room for robotic life, filled with the same insidious stupidity day in and day out, to the point that we become closed off to life, almost a shadow of our own possibility.  We walk then in life almost like we are half switched off, a simpleton that does no longer bother to think anymore.  It shows up in our work when we continue to make mistakes, just from the fact that life has become so repetitive, that we are no longer participating in it through our mind anymore, totally off in some other place all together.

The real truth is that we are all philosophers of life and should derive real meaning from our own goals and purpose.  This should not have to be a task to be taught.  Not something we need to go to university to learn.  We should already know that we have the right to see life the way we choose and know that our own thinking comes from our own philosophies and individualized truth.  It will not matter how many people we ask for help from, how many experts we turn to in order to find reasoning, the real truth is going to only come to a person when they choose for it within themselves.  The point where they finally decide to think for themselves rather than only experiencing life on what they are told as they are growing up. 

Thinking is free and it is the only thing that cannot be caged within this limiting world.  If we choose to see that it can only be experienced by philosophers, experts, or only something a complex and deep person would even care to bother with, then we might as well bind our chains together and sing our life away for others to take control of the reins.  We are not robots, or intellectually unable.  We should not be told by others how smart we are based on how many things we can remember in one moment in our brains.  Smart comes from realizing that we all have the ability to conceptualize life and possibility, that it does not have to be given away to another person who says that they are better at it.  We choose to give our natural abilities away, not because we are unable.  Thinking is free and all can do it, depending on choice and our desire to bother with finding meaning through our own exploration of life and reality.

One should not have to leave philosophy to the experts.  Instead to see free thinking people as artists, just like ourselves, with their own meaning and purpose for life that might be interesting to explore but only taken on by choice.  Life should first be taken on individually before it is reasoned socially.  Only then do we truly live life without having to justify our cause, without having to only follow the path of popularity and expectation.  We are the guides of our own life through our own choice to think and reason.  It is not a special gift but a truth that we have a mind in which to think.  Since it is there, we might as well use it.

By Stacey T Pollock