If this year has taught me anything, it’s that a lot of messed up stuff happens in the world. That, and I need to pay more attention to my emotions.
Children are not born knowing anything, so there’s a point in our life where we first learn about death. At some point we discover racism, classism, the Second World War… we steadily peel away layers of childlike naïveté. In that sense, I was your average child skipping through my early years, and now I’m a stressed student a couple weeks away from exams. There’s a joke here, which would go something like ‘exams, a greater hardship than all of the above,’ which I won’t make. (At least, not directly.) On a global scale, there are things worthy of a lot more gravity than exams.
There’s a problem: I care about my small-scale exams, relationships and word counts, yet discrimination, climate change and the ever-present threat of omnicidal A.I. deserve orders of magnitude more respect. Just how much am I meant to care about those?
We have finite thoughts per day, so there’s a limit to how much we can care about. Ayn Rand would tell you to care about your own life, and let the weakminded succumb to compassion. Karl Marx would tell you to forget about your own ambitions, because once you overcome capitalism then individual lives will sort themselves out on their own. Any sane philosopher (as oxymoronic as that seems) would probably try to reconcile both of those into one firm but generally applicable theory.
My first thought is to figure out what that theory would look like, but instead I’ll listen to my heart. I don’t like any of those three perspectives. What makes philosophers so sure that there is some optimum way to divide your time and energy? There are no right answers for how to live your life, and no wrong ones. That’s liberating — and it makes for one less question to stress about.

Image from a Lion King colouring book in the Arts Scholars room.