What if you went into an interview and someone asked you, “what is your philosophy of life?” How easily could you answer that question?By

“philosophy of life” I mean a mental framework for understanding how

the world works and how you fit into the world. The philosophy of life

would include things like how you decide what is “good” and “bad”, what

“success” means, what your “purpose” in life is (including if you don’t

think there is a purpose), whether there is a God, how we should treat

each other, etc.There

are many names you might be use to label your philosophy oflife:

Libertarian, Feminist, Liberal, Conservative, Buddhist, Christian,

Entrepreneur, Artist, Environmentalist, Tea Party, and any number of

others. Maybe you feel you could summarize your philosophy of life with

one of those words, but for most of us I’d suspect that our actual

philosophies of life are more complex and nuanced. They are not so

easily boxed in. If we sat down in an interview, could you explain

yours?Knowing what I do about you as a group of readers, I’d guess I could divide you into three groups.The

first group has a clear philosophy of life that you have thought

through in-depth, have tested, and use regularly and explicitly for

guiding your actions. I’ll call you “The True North Group.” You

have a compass for life and you know which direction is the right way —

the true north. If I asked about yourphilosophy of life, you could

explain it to me immediately, cogently, and concisely from the top of

your head. You may not be able to give it a one-word label but you have

thought it through and could explain why yourphilosophy of life makes

sense to you and how it governs your thinking. I would guess this is the

smallest group of the three.The

second group are those of you who have a loosely organized philosophy

oflife in which things basically hang together, but which you couldn’t

summarize quickly from the top of your head. If I gave you a little more

time, you could come up with an overarching framework that covers most

things, though the fringes and the corner cases of life would remain

gray. I will call you “The Dusty Compass Group.”

It’s like you have a compass for directing your life, but you forget to

use it. You have a roughly coherent system for understanding the world,

and you pretty much know it intuitively, but most of the time you don’t

explicitly use it to filter and direct your experience. The compass

lies on the shelf collecting dust. When you eventually pull it out, you

see it’s gotten a little wacky and you need to recalibrate it. My guess

is that this experience describes the largest group of people.The third group I will call “The Inbox Group.”

For The Inbox Group I’m abandoning the compass metaphor because if you

are in this group, you do not actually have a governing magnetic

orientation for what life is about and where you are going. Life may be

about something, heck, your life may be about

something, but you don’t know. You’re too busy to think about it. Your

approach is just to deal with what is coming at you, the way you manage

email. People and companies constantly send you messages to direct your

attention and you basically follow their lead. Why are you watching that

new Netflix show? Why are you listening to that new Kanye song? Why did

you decide to be a surgeon anyway? You don’t really know. Or you think

you know, but the reasons turn out to be pretty superficial. I think

this is likely the second biggest group, though it might be the biggest.The difference between members of these three groups is almost entirely internal. You

wouldn’t be able to pick them out on the street. But their internal

experience of life will be entirely different. One man plays squash

because he has a true north philosophy about pushing himself to his

limits, maintaining his health and investing in friendships with his

playing partners. Another may value these same things but couldn’t

articulate them. He just knows he likes to play. A third has no real

reason for playing other than someone asked him to. Maybe he just wants

to be seen at the racquet club. Maybe he just likes being asked. The

external action of chasing a ball around a court is the same but the

internal motivation and experience is totally different.In

general, I think it is better to live as a member of the True North

group. I say “in general” because there are exceptions. Some people have

clear, explicit lifephilosophies, but locking in those ideas has made

them narrow un-curious thinkers, who are a little too arrogant that

they’ve figured it all out.For

the most part however, I think it is healthy to have a comprehensive

framework for life and to live in line with it. True North is the way to

go, provided you remain humble, curious, and open to the possibility

you may be wrong. The alternative, of being in the Dusty Compass Group

or the Inbox Group, is to not have an orienting vision for your life. It

means you are constantly at-risk of forgetting what you are about, know

getting what life is about and steering off-course (i.e., wasting your

time).Death

is the great leveler for these groups. You might be in the Dusty

Compass Group or the Inbox Group most of the time, but when you brush

near death -your own death or the death of someone you care about — your

philosophy oflife has a way of getting clearer. The experience of

nearness to death acts as a jolt that prompts you to yearn to be in the

True North Group — to live, as it were, on purpose. To make it count.You

may have had someone guide you through the exercise of thinking about

what your obituary will say when you die. For many of us, it is an

arresting exercise because, if we are honest, the way we are spending

our time isn’t totally in line with what we want our lives to be about.

Realizing that fact is like waking from from a daydream.For

many of us, when we come near death the experience moves us closer to

the True North Group and away from what Paul Graham describes as “the

things life is too short for.” In the face of mortality, we think hard

about what matters and the things that come to mind are no surprise:

family, friendships, treating people well, learning, keeping our health.

We promise ourselves that those things will be our priority. And we

actually begin to live more in line with our aspirations.But

the weeks and months go by, and slowly, imperceptibly to us, but almost

inevitably, we drift back to distraction. We look at the compass less

frequently. We just deal with what is coming at us. We don’t completely

forget what is important us, but we figure we can get to it later. We

don’t completely forget what we think life is all about, but the notion

becomes less clear, less poignant, like an old photograph faded by the

sun. Without the vivid orienting direction of a clear philosophy of

life, it becomes easy to do whatever’s easiest instead of living the way

we’d want our obituaries to read.I

like to think I’m a True North Guy, but honestly, the reality is I

probably am a Dusty Compass with momentary leaps up into True North

territory. That’s why I find remarkable those souls who somehow maintain

a consistency of philosophy, and who live in line with it. They are

remarkable because it is hard to live with character. It is hard to live

as if life won’t go on forever. And it’s why, every now and again, I

find that reflecting on the reality of death is one of the best things I

can do to make the most of the reality of my life.