Why are my beliefs back on the brain? My beliefs govern my life, any thinking about them or attempts to refactor them is certain to ripple through my life, so what am I seeking to change in my life?

What is life?

Is it just what we see and do?

What would non-life be? Death? Perhaps not, death is a part of life so might be inaccessible to anything that is not alive. Inaccessible? Can we have death? Can we possess it? Is death inside or outside of life?

Is death the last chapter, or the infinite after?

Venkatesh Rao treads similar ground in What is a life?, looking at a life as an accumulation of experiences, while stressing the need for a life to have a stable, “recognizable” core identity around which this accumulation happens.

I like accumulation as a metaphor for looking closely at life, at a life, at my life.

But belief in something greater than all that we can perceive, something like God, surely yields a more convincing and complete lens for a believer, “You have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our heart is restless until it rests in you.”, St. Augustine in his Confessions. Believing this life to be a part of a journey toward God grants the believer a firm existential setting. But I do not believe. I was not raised in a faith, I do not wish that I had been. I do not believe in GOD, poly-Gods, talking snakes, or corporeal unicorns.

And even the faithful have still to wrestle with this question, and also with the far more pernicious, “is this life that I have lived enough for this GOD under whom I have lived?”, so I don’t know if faith really salves.

Where faith probably does help is in the depth of philosophical study carried out inside the walls of the house(s) of GOD. More has been thought and done in the service of GOD than not. The corpus of theology has touched, inspired, and expanded every school and avenue of thought and gives the believer such a rich and storied thread on which to draw as can hardly be compared to any other.

A life without GOD is a life in which our own ego takes to the stage, for good and for ill. Without GOD I am free to explore (and indulge) my ego, but I must also teach my ego to inhibit itself for no GOD exists (to me) that will do that for me.

So perhaps a life is simply what accumulates around our own ego. People, ideas, trinkets & treasures, name, and fortune. All enter into the orbit of our ego and our ego too is pulled into the orbit of other egos & ideas. The result is a chaos of forces akin to that of the Three Body Problem. The result is a life.