1. Introduction

In the beginning the Universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move - The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams

In that series, Marvin is a paranoid android that goes through existential dread all the time and is pessimistic. If you are an adult, you must have been a Marvin at some point in your life. We all go through different phases and moods in our lives. Life feels so simple one day but incredibly hard another day. When it is simple for too long, we get bored. When it is hard for too long, we get depressed.

One day we feel motivated enough to run a marathon in a storm and to start reading War and Peace . Another day, a gentle sneeze feels like a good enough excuse to not get out of the bed and a tweet requires a TL;DR.

Then there are those rare days when we stop and ask ourselves the question - Why? What’s the point of this world? What is the purpose of life? It could be a day when it feels like life couldn’t get any worse, like falling sick in winter when the heating in your home is broken. It could be a day when it feels like life is so mundane that you don’t even remember anything that happened in the past week. Or it could just be us drinking alcohol or smoking weed with a bunch of friends.

In spite of the fact that we humans tend to hit the TV remotes on their heads when they stop working, we pride ourselves in being rational creatures. So it is unsurprising that we ask such questions. After all, asking the Why question is what makes us rational creatures. We have a tendency to look for reasons why things happened.

When we ask ourselves serious questions about the world, life and existence, we usually tell ourselves a simplistic answer which would not withstand a serious debate. If the answers were that simple, we wouldn’t have philosophers argue about it over millennia and still not agree on a single issue.

In a way, finding a simple answer and going on with our lives is probably good for us. Darwinians might find an evolutionary explanation for this too. Trying to dig deeper would eventually expose us to the baseless assumptions on which the entire foundation of our lives and belief systems are built on. Questioning those assumptions will come in the way of spreading our genes. But more importantly, questioning these assumptions will destroy the foundation of all the values in our lives. While some take this as a challenge and get joy out of it, others may struggle handling this existential and moral crisis. There are quite a few philosophers who struggled with mental health issues, while a few of them went outright mad.

On the other hand, if you come to terms with the absurdity all around us, the philosophical questions become fun puzzles you enjoy trying to solve, even though you know that you will most probably never find an answer. Once you learn to surf the world of paradoxes, the waves give you feelings of joy instead of fear. Someone who is well-read in philosophy might ask if I am absurdist based on these last lines. I would like to clarify that though I have my own philosophical beliefs, my writings will not attempt to promote one or the other philosophy and that applies to absurdism. It is not my goal or my goal to direct people towards a philosophy I like.

So what’s the goal of this writing? It is my attempt to introduce people to philosophy, people who have never touched a philosophy book. My goal is to write it in a way that is easy to grasp and hopefully a bit fun. One might be tempted to call this Philosophy for Dummies. But considering the fact that I don’t have any qualification in philosophy, it is probably better called Philosophy by a Dummy.

Over the chapters, I will try to focus on what makes philosophy hard, the questions philosophers have been trying to answer and why the answers always seem elusive.I will also call out the fundamental assumptions we take for granted as truths in our lives and the paradoxes these assumptions lead us to. Though I have promised not to do propaganda for any particular philosophy, I may focus more on one or two philosophies just because they are more popular. I am not paid by those philosophers who support those philosophies. Most of them aren’t that rich anyway.

As with any writing that tries to simplify complex things, I will most definitely make some mistakes in approximations or using the philosophical jargon wrongly. But as long as the idea is conveyed, I will be a happy human and hope you are too. I will also recommend books at the end of some chapters if you want to dive deeper into the concepts discussed in the chapter.

By the end, if you make it to the end that is, I hope you find a new or increased admiration for philosophy and life itself. I hope I have given you questions to ponder over and topics you want to explore further. I hope this is just the start of a really long philosophical journey.