Philosophy is a disease and decisions are the cure.

I had a pretty nasty breakup about a year ago.

The bad bits about breakups heal pretty naturally. Time is good like that. You can make it easier or harder on yourself in a lot of ways though, with different types of escapism or coping mechanisms. Some are healthy, but most aren’t, at least compared to sitting there and riding out whatever you’re feeling.

I am a person that likes everything to be perfect. In many cases this just leaves me with a lot of anxiety, but it also manifests as a desire to optimise everything around me. It’s why my portfolio has counterintuitively shrunk over the years—I’d rather a few ‘perfect’ essays than a spread of crappy ones.

This essay isn’t about ‘perfect being the enemy of good’ or any other platitudes like that. It’s about what happens when you try to optimise a breakup, and how I got mixed up in philosophy as a result.

The circumstances of the breakup have been discussed in a few places, but the most notable part was the blindsiding. I know a lot of men fall into the trap of proclaiming ‘oh yeah bro, it totally came out of nowhere’—when they’ve actually just been a shitty boyfriend for months. And perhaps I was a shitty boyfriend at points, but my ex was not interested in sticking around long enough for me to find out from her. It was a three year relationship—over and done with in ten minutes, and I never saw it coming.

I processed pretty well—I was still on good terms with my therapist and I was emotionally and mentally pretty well-fortified at the time, so as much as it shellshocked me, it never threw me into a spiral. I endured, and I think there’s some pride to be taken in that.

The one instinct I did have though, as I do in every aspect of my life, was to try to understand what happened a little better. If I’d been younger, that might’ve meant TikToks and some kind of incel-related pipeline on the internet, but thankfully I’m past the age where having temper tantrums towards women is cool. Instead, I really wanted to get to grips on what to do with the rest of my world—losing a massive chunk of the foundation of my life (my relationship) caused me to grieve a future that would no longer exist. I think that’s an underrated part of breakups, having to deal with all the plans and all the possibilities stretching out in front of you falling away into a kind of emptiness.

It meant I had more free time and more attention to pay to hobbies or interests, and I spent a lot of that newly found energy on reading. As I tend to do when I hyperfixate, I consumed myself in learning and dissecting a topic I was compelled by—the idea that somewhere in the bowels of inaccessible German/French/Greek/whatever literature was an answer to what to do with myself, a direction that I could objectively determine to be ‘right’ and ‘correct’. Of course that was folly, but you can’t tell that kinda thing to someone heartbroken. Reason only goes so far.

The more I read, the more the entire field looked to me like a form of indiscriminate bickering. It is still awe-inspiring to me how entire legacies exist on the back of simply criticising the guy that came before you. And these people don’t take anything for granted. I mean seriously, they can’t even agree on whether we exist or not. The foundational metaphysics of the entire universe—still up in the air. And that actually makes sense to me now, having read through the rationales as to why. You can’t find objective answers in anything, or at least not ones that satisfy every edge case, every critique and every walk of life.

I think a lot of people know that, at least intuitively. If anything, I’m a little late to the party, and being slow meant there was a bit of required reading in order to catch up. That’s what I find philosophy to be good for, learning the fundamentals, and then taking things you believe in and litigating them. Conviction and confidence can be valuable traits, and you develop both of them by being more staunchly able to stand behind your own beliefs. It’s good that there’s an entire field dedicated to tearing apart ideas, because that means we can shore up the weak spots—figure out where the holes are and plug ’em.

So why call it a disease? After all, I’ve been nothing but complimentary so far—it even helped me process my emotional baggage in my own, slightly neurodivergent manner. Well, simply put, I’m projecting—my issues with philosophy come down to user error and I’m mad about it.

I think leaning on systems of reason and the experiences of others to try and explain my life’s trajectories to me was a good attempt at a support system, but—again, very obviously—was never going to be a replacement for making my own decisions. It became increasingly tricky to hold onto any of my own convictions, because for everything that I could find it in myself to believe in, there was a book by an angry French guy telling me why it was irrational to feel that way. The great number of contradictory philosophical projects out there mean that you can truly find support for almost any idea, and then find four times the amount of support for people criticising and undercutting that very belief. Do you want existential crises? Because this is how you get existential crises.

It was a very emotionally charged habit. Like I said, mourning the loss of my future made me want to cling onto something with certainty, but nothing in any historical systems of thought was satisfactorily sturdy. You can’t read your way into decisiveness. The disease was thinking that you could. Replacing finding personal meaning and significance with systematised logic, in the hopes of finding an Objective North Star, was a mistake, even if I can totally understand how I arrived there.

I consider this an issue because I know this same problem affects others. There is a widespread epidemic of overthinkers who, in their respective disciplines, think that an answer exists somewhere outside themselves. It’s a tricky problem to solve, too—because what’s the alternative? Not thinking or reading?

There are blocks of philosophy that deal with personal meaning, and when we’re discussing the issues of existential crises or concerns of self-identity, personal meaning is such a significant part of the puzzle. What can be derived via academic proofs is one thing—getting out of bed in the morning is a whole other issue entirely, and as much as I wanted to believe it, the two had precious little to do with each other. You can never find permission to exist or act from the universe, it has to be self-induced.

Even if you believe in signs from the cosmos—you’re giving the signs their significance to yourself through interpretation. It’s all individual and subjective, all the way down, and the only solution is leaning into such things. The philosophers are screaming and crying right now, but pragmatism is truly the only way through this quandary without going insane. It’s like the Buddhist phrase: ‘Before Enlightenment, chop wood, carry water. After Enlightenment, chop wood and carry water.’ Your world might change, via new understanding or new knowledge, but the decisions you make every day, and the way you live your life could be exactly the same before and after consuming all the Nietzche in the world.

I always have a great deal of trouble writing about topics like this. I think it’s because when I write, I try to consider my reader. If you write an instruction manual for something, you expect to have to start at the beginning and work your reader through all the components of the appliance you’re writing about. But life, meaning, philosophy, decisions, love—these concepts aren’t elementary, and everyone’s experiences with them are so wildly varied. It feels redundant to start at the beginning, but starting in the middle means keeping some people that might’ve read this from following along.

The goal with a post like this is to chip away at a bigger project of mine, which is to try and figure out the world, ironically much the same as the goals of any of history’s great thinkers. When I talk about topics so grand and wide in scope, it’s to try and cling onto even a fragment of understanding. I know from experiences journalling that writing tends to crystallise and clarify your thinking, even if only to yourself. I came from writing journal entries—‘dear diary‘ is a great stepping stone to an open-ended essay writer. I don’t think I’ll ever lose the drive to compose things in order to try and figure things out for myself. The machinations of the world and our place within it are very compelling to me, and even if philosophy doesn’t have all the answers, it certainly has its place.

Philosophy is good for answering the ‘why?’, and it helps you make better-informed decisions. That doesn’t mean they have to be different decisions. I realise I’m giving a simple conclusion to an incredibly nuanced problem, but I think that really is the only way through a vague crisis of meaning. Overanalysis will cause paralysis, and your tolerance for over-analysing anything is partially a skill issue and partially a question of compartmentalisation. Philosophy has a time and a place, and I needed to square away my relationship with it before I could go back to having a life, and allowing myself to make decisions that were simply just meaningful to me.