The Flower and The Pyramid

We all arrive in this world unadorned — naked, and helpless.

Why are we here?

To express ourselves.

Fundamentally, humans are expressive, linguistic creatures. We grasp the world with our minds, and our minds use language to form concepts to understand and manipulate the world.

This blog is called The Flower and The Pyramid, and it's about the relationship between human expressiveness ("The Flower"), and an opposing concept of hierarchical relationships that arise out of pursuing utility divorced of expressiveness ("The Pyramid").

Language can have expressive aspects, but it can also have utility. Ultimately, only the expressive aspect has meaning. Some examples of expressive language are expressing your love for a child, writing a song, or having a conversation with a friend or stranger. Some examples of language in pursuit of utility are spreading gossip at work to try to get a promotion, ordering a pizza via a phone call, or having a conversation with a contractor about renovating your house.

The utility aspect of language has meaning only insofar as it serves our ability to express ourselves. Expressiveness is the proper telos of human existence — or in other words, the proper end goal of human existence. Utility is just a means to the end of expressiveness.

My contention is that human life is happier when it's oriented towards expressiveness. Doing so is not always obvious, so it helps to think of yourself as a gardener trying to water the Flower of your own life. Also, it helps to think about the tumult of the world as a hierarchical Pyramid that wants to disrupt your gardening, and get you to focus on things that don't matter for your happiness.

I think these ideas are true, because they accord with my own experience as it relates to my own deficit of happiness from focusing too much on what others had said was the proper thing to do with my time. Ultimately, I don't think it's proper to tell people how they should like to spend their time, because their lives belong to them. These and other realizations lead me to these new ideas that I'm exploring in this blog and deepening in this blog, because they seem promising to me.

So, I'm trying to think about this new philosophy on a deep, fundamental level, so that I can orient my life in a direction likely to lead to my own happiness. And maybe, other people can benefit too. I hope there is value in it, and that you get something out of it also.