• Wheatley
    2.3k
    We all came out of a woman's womb but we didn't come with any instruction manuals. Meaning you are basically on your own when it comes to how to live your life. Sure, there are guide for various aspects of life. If you decide you want to be a doctor, you can go to medical school and they will guide you on your way to be a doctor. If you want to cook something there's always a recipe you can find. But where is the general comprehensive guide on how to live your life?

    The first few years of one's life is really beyond your control. Your parents will guide you. They will teach you to be toilet trained, and perhaps how to behave. Your parents won't always there but teachers will guide you through your education, and through your peers you will learn social skills. Not much of a problem here. No one will ask a child, "What are you going to do with your life?" It's pretty straightforward at this point.

    Fast forward to the teenage years. Being a teenager, life is no longer simple and what you decide now can have tremendous affects on the rest of your life. There's potential to pave the way to a really good life. There's also the chance to completely ruin yourself. With such a pivotal moment in your life, might it be helpful to have something solid a teenager can rely on on? How about, "The Official Guide of Life: part one, teenage years."?

    Why stop there? We could add chapters on your young adult life, middle age, to senior years. All with a detailed troubleshooting guide.

    Why haven't I seen such a thing? Is it really a bad idea?
  • tim wood
    9.2k
    Why haven't I seen such a thing? Is it really a bad idea?Purple Pond
    Because you keep your eyes wide shut! - not necessarily always a bad thing. But a walk-through of any large bookstore like B&N will reveal even hundreds of linear feet of shelf space devoted to authors who would tell you in detail the what, how, and why of how you ought to be living your life, from ancient Sumerians and Egyptians as oldest extant but certainly not original thinkers on the subject, through the Greeks and derivatively the Romans, to the newest man/woman-child who thinks they something new to add.

    At the same time, not everyone is equally good at re-inventing the wheel. It all becomes, then, a matter of choosing your mentor. I favor Stoicism informed by Aristotle, with the addition - to put some meat on the bones - of a reasoned and rational Christianity. Some folks will favor the East on these matters, but of that I don't know enough to judge.
  • Gus Lamarch
    924
    But where is the general comprehensive guide on how to live your life?Purple Pond

    This is almost an utopian kind of question. How to live your life? That's only for the individual to learn and understand as better as he can, some may understand 100% of it and live a great life, but that life could be the worse one for someone else. In conclusion, the individual has his life, and how he will live it, it's only for him to get.
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