How to Live and Why

I may as well get right to it. This blog is called “How to Live and Why,” so let’s talk about that. So do I have the answer to Life, the Universe, and Everything? Well, not exactly, but I have come to some conclusions about what the point of life is that I have found useful. Perhaps you will too. First came the questioning. Sometime in my early twenties, I realized I was a nihilist. I don’t mean that I started throwing rocks at cars and shouting “Life is meaningless!” I just mean that I followed a chain of reasoning that led me to the conclusion that nothing in the universe has inherent value. I had already known I was an atheist for some time, and without a god to say that something is inherently valuable, the only thing left to give something inherent  value was the universe itself. But I don’t believe the universe values anything. The universe is inanimate. Now that’s all fine and dandy in terms of a logical conclusion, but it does tend to cause a bit of a psychologica...

Hi there. Welcome to my blog. At this point, this blog is basically an experiment to see what it’s like to have a blog, whether I like it, and what it might be useful for. But ultimately I’m hoping that by sharing some of what I’ve learned about life so far, I can help some other people who are also searching for something. By way of introduction, here’s a little about me: I don’t really know what I want to do with my life, but I’m gradually figuring it out. I studied math and philosophy in college/grad school. I love solving (theoretical) puzzles and figuring out how a concept works. I’m a stay-at-home mom/part-time nanny with an almost-3-year-old. Since my early twenties I’ve been on a bit of a mission to figure out how to live and why (thus the title of the blog). I’m hoping we can figure it out together :) I tend to get really obsessively into niche topics for a while and then give them up and move onto a new topic. Sometimes old interests make periodic reap...