Philosophical Honesty (Of Two Worlds #3)
March 1, 2026
Previously: Of Two Worlds #2: Don't Let The World Get To You.
I find that philosophers are not always very clear about what particular problem they are trying to solve, or, more importantly, why they wish to solve it. It often takes a great deal of effort to reverse-engineer the emotional or sentimental impulses that lie behind their logical arguments. In my case, I make no pretense to a desire for truth, or a predilection for strict rationality. I have a fondness for logic, and I use it for my dastardly purposes as I see fit — but at the end of the day, I am a particular man, with a particular history and particular interests, trying to use philosophy to explain why all of that is the case and what I’m supposed to do about it.
Let’s start with a brief biography. We will start in earnest at age 17, when a creature resembling Balckwell first began to emerge. At age 17, I got a girlfriend. Over the next three years, I broke up with her three times. The third time I broke up with her was a few weeks after moving to Japan for a study abroad program. That was the only time it stuck. For a month, I was elated. Then, I spent three years being miserable about it. My time in Japan imbued my life with a distinct sense of surreality — in a very real sense, those six months were a long dream. I woke up painfully and with a start.
I finished my diploma at a local community college. I studied English. The reason I studied English is because at age 16 I decided I should read a lot of books. Between ages 13 and 16 the only books I read were by John Irving and Bill Bryson. So, I started branching out. Eventually, I was reading books from all over the world. I was reading books that made incredible amounts of sense. One year after returning from Japan, I read Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time. This was an event so significant that I later chose to include it in a very brief biography of myself.
I worked at a fruit store. I moved out of my parent’s house, and lived in a series of basements. I read Arthur Schopenhauer’s The World as Will and Representation. This was an event so significant that I later chose to include it in a very brief biography of myself. I forgot to mention: between graduating high school and some time around meeting my wife — a period of five years — I was extremely depressed. I was likely depressed throughout most of high school as well, but it’s hard to tell at that age.
While in those basements, I started trying to improve my life. My strategy for improving my life involved removing everything I considered extraneous. I ate little and spent little money. My primary goal was to sustain myself while working as few hours as possible. I didn’t use my free hours for much of anything besides berating myself for how little I was using my free hours. And yet, I always felt I was getting a little better. I’m not sure why I felt that.
For those three years after returning from Japan, when all I thought and wrote about was my ex-girlfriend and My Dead Japan, I lived most of my life in dreams. Dreams were the only real events I could point to in my life. I would dream about my ex-girlfriend, and that would determine the next leg of my long, long journey of “getting over it.” Sometimes, I convinced myself that I still loved her, or at the very least, that I should have still loved her. Then, I would dream about Japan, and I would be living in Japan and Vancouver at the same time, and there was no way of telling which life was real. When I was awake, I would read books — which is its own form of dreaming.
Instead of starting a career and “making something of myself,” I dreamed. I dreamed all the time. Many of these dreams were nightmares. Let’s say at least half.
Looking toward the future — this too is a form of dreaming. When I considered my future, it seemed impossible for it to turn out any good. Most of these dreams were nightmares. These nightmares had no distinct form: I wasn’t foreseeing death or squalor or misfortune. Primarily the nightmares took the form of an indescribable dread, which I suppose we could describe using the word “failure.” I was scared that I would never actually become myself. Or, I was scared that I had already become myself.
My life didn’t look anything like the lives I saw on the internet. It didn’t look like how life was supposed to look. I had the sense that I wasn’t supposed to be working at a fruit store. Everyone else had full-time jobs. They met up with friends and ate brunch. They paid bills. I always had this feeling like I had side-stepped life. I didn’t feel jealous, because it seemed like all these things that other people had only made them miserable with a slightly different misery than my own. Instead, I felt guilty. Everyone else was out there participating in the world — thus, their trials and tribulations were real. Nothing about my trials and tribulations were real. I made $1300 a month and still managed to have a bed and eat food. I didn’t have a car or an Xbox or basically anything that cost over $200. My dad put together my bedframe in his garage, because my room was too small to fit a normal bed. (I was supposed to help, but got dreadfully sick on the day we were supposed to make it.)
I was still working at the fruit store when I met my wife. Six months later, I began work on my first novel. These two events are intrinsically connected. My wife was convinced that I was someone who could write a novel. I suppose that, in some indirect sense, I had convinced her of that. I’m not sure how I did that. I wanted my first novel to be like The Dream of the Red Chamber. It ended up not being like that at all.
My first novel is about dreams. It’s about a person who doesn’t think that he is a real person. In my case, I finally decided that I was a real person about a year ago. This decision did me some good, and some harm. I had desperately wanted to be a real person for a long time; when I finally felt it in my grasp, I became obsessed. I was so absorbed in being real, in living a normal adult life, that I lost sight of myself.
I became real when I finally got a full-time job. I started meeting a lot of people who I decided were real, and they thought I was a real person. It never even would have occurred to them to think that I wasn’t a real person. I decided that being real meant participating in the world in similar ways to how they participated in the world. I figured that I should have a kid, because fathers seemed like the realest possible people. I would work my full-time job and pay the bills and my children would go to school and sometimes we would go on little trips. I would have a few hobbies to occupy my free time. Maybe I would play sports.
My full-time job led to me developing tendinitis in both wrists. The results of the many months I spent at home recovering from this injury can be found on this website. When separated from my new reality, I became confused. I fell right back into exactly who I had always been. I remembered the joy of being unreal. Then, I had to go back to work. I wanted to maintain my unreality; I also wanted to maintain the self-confidence that had come with being real. I struggled to find a compromise. It is imperative — for the time being at least — that I spend a great deal of time at my job. While at my job, I am enmeshed in a social world full of its own complications and preoccupations. But when I return home, I don’t want to be in that world at all. Because when you’re not currently in that world but are only reflecting on it, it become clear that that world is incredibly boring.
At first, I decided that I just need to live primarily in this job-world until I can retire, at which point I can return to my jolly little private world. But when I reflected more, I realized that time wasn’t necessarily the determining factor. During those months when I had been at home alone all the time, I wasn’t always necessarily in the “place” I wanted to be. I was being whirled around by worldly concerns all the time. Instead, what I needed was a way of separating the world I occupy at home from the world I occupy at work. I needed this separation to occur almost instantaneously, as soon as I stepped foot in my door. And most importantly, I needed to justify this wholesale separation in a way that didn’t feel hopelessly cynical, nihilistic, or self-absorbed.
Thus, I began work on the theory of the Two Worlds: the Worldly World and the Other Realm. This whole cosmology is, of course, cobbled together from a wide variety of philosophies I have found myself fascinated with over the years: there’s some Plato, some Kant, a bit of Schopenhauer’s pessimism, the ambiguity of Dream of the Red Chamber’s Heaven-Earth/True-False dichotomies, a little bit of Daoism, some Buddhist ethics — really, everything I’ve encountered over the years that has made me feel a little better about my life. Of course, we can’t forget Proust’s preoccupation with dreams, yearnings, and memories. In fact, we can say that there’s more of literature than of philosophy in the whole thing.
I won’t attempt to psychoanalyze myself. I’ll leave that to you, if you’re interested. I don’t know who the hell I am. I don’t know why I’ve been allowed to become this way. A lot of the things that seem important to others don’t seem important to me, and they only feel less and less important as time goes on. In the words of Emil Sinclair, I only ever wanted to “live the life that was spontaneously welling up inside of me.”1 I’ve always had this belief that if I could only figure out myself, everything else would follow. This is why I need my own world: my Other Realm, which exists isolated within the imagination, not subject to the vicissitudes of all that goes on out there. I need my freedom, because it feels like the only way to explain how things have turned out this way, leaving me in such a topsy-turvy position. Everyone else has done everything they’ve done, while I’m here having done whatever it is that I’ve done, and doing whatever it is I’m currently doing. It’s got to make sense somehow. And if I can’t explain how I became this way, or why I feel like it’s the only way to be, I can at least build a little philosophical castle in which to house it all, whose walls I can point to and say, “there it is! There’s whatever that is!”
1. Perhaps this is why I have such a fondness for Hesse, an author often derided for his naive Orientalism and “sophomoric” philosophizing — at the very least, the man was asking the right questions. He looked beyond trivial concerns and tried to get right down to whatever lies beneath it all.↩