Are you confused? Directionless? Tired of trying to figure it all out? Does the thought of slogging through the history of philosophy trying to figure out what does and doesn't make sense to you depress and/or intimidate you?
Well, now there's an answer. For a $40 donation to the Partially Examined Life podcast and blog, I will write you a personalized personal philosophy, and publicly display it on this blog and, if you'd like, on your Facebook page or somewhere else. What a frickin' awesome gift idea, too! I will personally with my very own fingers paste your philosophy into an e-mail to send to the target of your gift, and can include that person's actual full name and photo and can maybe work in other personal details if you provide me with them.
Each philosophy will be tailor made to order, with at least 100 words expended, and you can specify how technical vs. worldly and how cruel vs. benign to make it, though ultimately it will be up to my whim what you get, and there are no refunds.
Here are some samples (you can see all of them posted to date here):
George Smith’s Personal Philosophy
I don’t take shit from nobody… except my parents, teachers, superiors at work, celebrities, anyone that seems to be talented in some way, large dogs, small dogs, fry cooks, and people with “that look.”
When I walk down the street, I expect people to take notice. That’s why I always wear layers and layers of tattoos, mostly temporary, so that I can wash them off if someone looks at me as if they don’t like the tattoos, which makes me run into the nearest public restroom crying.
All in all, I am one bad ass mutha, and if you say something about my mutha I’ll be very upset, which will make you feel quite guilty!
Peggy Smith’s Personal Philosophy
Peggy is a believer in the unified string theory, in that everything is part of the same string, so that if you want to move any given thing, you simply have to grab any other given thing and pull, and eventually, the part of the string with the thing you want to move will start to be pulled. This is all theoretical, of course, because you would need an enormous amount of energy to do this, like, more than Peggy has, for sure.
Also, there is no “grabbing” that is not also part of the string, and so “grabbing” would be like the string grabbing itself, which is a knot, and if you knot the strings then you’re knotting everything, and that is the ontologically grounded definition of evil, so don’t even try to do that, tempting as it may be. In conclusion, Peggy believes that you should not try to move anything, and she lives up to her ideals in this respect.
To order: Simply click the "donate" button to your right, donate at least $40, and email me at mark@partiallyexaminedlife.com with this information:
1. The name of the person to create this philosophy for
2. How technical (i.e. more appropriate for people with philosophy knowledge, as your 8 year old might not appreciate Hegel-specific jokes) or cruel I'm allowed to be
3. A link to an online photo of the person that I can embed into the post, or alternately just send me a .jpg, unless you don't want a photo involved, which is also fine, but then I might link to a photo like this one instead:
4. Any other information about the person's hobbies, characteristics, that would be nice for me to work in, though again, I may just disregard this completely.
5. Any other specifications (e.g. "make it vaguely Eastern-sounding" or "make it sciency," or "make it Nietzsche-based"), which again, I may completely ignore, but may inspire me.
I will address requests in the order they're received and can't promise to do more than one of these per day, plus I imagine that the first-ordered ones among these will likely be more inspired than others, so make your donation today!
-Mark Linsenmayer
w says
December 10, 2010 at 10:14 pmI will happily donate 20 dollars if you guys fix the comments section so that I can post from Safari! I figured my posts were awaiting moderation when I posted them, but none of them have shown up and unfortunately one of them was quite lengthy and I was looking forward to a response from Seth.
This may be frustrating other people too, who haven’t switched browsers to complain as I have.
Seth Paskin says
December 11, 2010 at 7:42 amw, I found a couple of your posts in the spam filter. I’m not sure why, but I’m approving them.
Mark L. from a Safari Browser says
December 10, 2010 at 11:22 pmHi, this is Mark, and I’m here writing in from my wife’s computer, which uses Safari, and not logging in via the WordPress back end, so if this comment shows up, then your complaint is hereby falsified! (That said, I’m sorry you’re having this problem and will try to figure out why it might be happening and what I can do to fix it. Thanks for your persistence!)
Mark Linsenmayer says
December 10, 2010 at 11:25 pmSo yes, the above comment worked; as soon as I entered it, it was awaiting moderation, so I signed in and allowed it to be posted, and that worked, so I’m not sure what was going wrong with you.
It’s vaguely possible that our spamfilter was catching you up, but we tend to look through all the spam before deleting it so we would have recognized your comment as not spam assuming it gave any hint of responding to one of the posts. Hmmmm.
Daniel Horne says
December 10, 2010 at 11:26 pmGoogling around, I think it may be that Safari users have to adjust their cache settings to be able to post comments. Just a thought…YMMV.