Philosophy has helped me grow.

Philosophy is an open discipline that keeps on giving. You may have seen in popular media and around the world have heard that philosophy is dead and or dying. But let's work that statement out a bit because as long as there are humans there should and will be philosophy. This discipline dates back insanely far we see philosophy start via the Western world with Plato. And in the Asian world, it dates back as far as the 6th century and even further with Chinese philosophy as well as Buddhist philosophy. As a whole philosophy has helped humans transcend and become more informed and independent thinkers.

The moment I'm writing this I'm currently about seventy-five percent done with my undergrad studying philosophy and in that short stint of time I can wholeheartedly say that philosophy has helped me grow as a more rounded and ultimately better person. It helped me rediscover my childhood curiosity when I thought I lost it for good. It helped me be more open to different ideals, taught me to think for myself, made my beliefs more concrete and helped me strive to find the ideal life I want to live. And maybe from sharing my experience so far, it can help someone grow more into a better and happier person.

Whenever I first started my undergraduate degree, I was a young naive college student who was under the misinterpretation that philosophy was useless and wasn't anywhere near the standards of science. This misinterpretation happens a lot with people nowadays because we're raised in a society that praises that science is the means and ends of all things, science being the most important thing around. STEM gets preached on by administration everywhere you go and in no means is this a bash towards STEM because it's very important and produces great people and amazing discoveries. However, we're never taught about philosophy and this led me into my freshman year being a physics major turned Education/Science. As I took my science courses I realized It wasn't for me because I wasn't a fan of the method to get these discoveries now don’t get me wrong I do love science and more specifically astronomy, but I feel like my curiosity was being underutilized and was being lack lustered by all the systematic methodology to get to the stuff I was interested in. Not only that the array of questions that I got to pursue wasn't a lot and discouraged me from taking any more classes towards that major. Thus, getting me to take an elective for Intro to Philosophy. This course sparked my curiosity because there were so many topics that I was curious about like is god real? Why are we moral beings? What can we know? The list goes on and on.

As I dove deeper into my philosophy degree, I realized how far I've come in maturity in my thinking and the questioning of everything I stumble upon. During this process of maturing and thinking for myself, you realize how truly liberating and freeing this can be and how you don’t know how or why you weren't doing this before. Thinking for yourself doesn’t mean that you don’t or can't ever take constructive criticism it helps you take it and learn from it so, in turn, you have a better foundation of beliefs to grasp too. The start of leading any meaningful life is the ability to think for yourself because from there we get solid beliefs and solid goals to go after but if you don’t start to think for yourself you'll follow the crowd and doing so you won't find your passion but the passions of others.

Since I really attuned myself through my degree to think for myself this made me discover more evidence to redefine my beliefs. Granted my beliefs at the current moment are changing quite frequently because I'm still learning to develop my own theories and beliefs, I believe in. Although the beliefs I currently hold are much stronger than they were when I was a freshman. If I could travel in time and have a philosophical debate on my beliefs with my younger self before I found philosophy, I would've been absolutely shocked to see how little support for my beliefs I really had. As your beliefs become stronger the more likely you can live following these beliefs and living out your ideal life. Say for example you're a Christian who believes in God and you’ve done the necessary thinking for yourself and research to see if your beliefs would change and they don’t then you’ve implemented strong supporting arguments you can then be more comfortable living through this belief and following Gods moral code, less time thinking about what happens when you die because you have heaven or hell, etc. Building up your beliefs is important to living an ideal human life.

Finding the ideal life to live is something many people spend their whole lives trying to find. Studying philosophy and philosophers who argue on what the ideal life is could help you realize what virtues; it is that you find important in life. This ideal life of mine was one in which I always wanted to pursue the unknown, find the answers to every question that stumped me. As a child like many others, I was always curious as to what made everything tick. Whys the sky blue? Why do we have a moon? The list of questions children ask are endless. And for me, as I grew up, I knew I never wanted to lose that curiosity because I found it too be one of the most important things in life. But maybe this isn't your ideal life, maybe it could be playing a sport, whatever it may be it's important to find your ideal life before it's too late philosophy has helped me do this and I believe it could help anyone of you too.