Purpose
“Philosophy begins in wonder. And at the end, when philosophic thought has done its best, the wonder remains.”
I created this site to give people a space to slow down, think deeply, and learn from each other.
This site is rooted in the conviction that we all share a basic human need to reflect on our lives, our world, and the values we live by. As Nietzsche famously stated, “[h]e who has a why to live for can bear almost any how.” You may be able to survive without a sense of purpose, but you can only truly thrive amidst the myriad pains, frustrations, and disappointments of life if you have taken the time to work out what you think makes life worth living.
This site is furthermore rooted in the conviction that reflection is not a purely solitary pursuit. Although you need a sense of meaning and purpose that you can embrace for yourself, we are, at heart, social creatures. Each person learns who they are and what they are about through their interactions with others. You do not establish a sense of yourself apart from others or despite others; rather, your sense of self is a sense of self-among-others. As such, we benefit from sharing our reflections on life with others who reciprocate with their own reflections.
The kind of reflection that provides meaning and solace takes time and focus – scarce resources in the increasingly noisy 21st century. We live in a world that monomaniacally pursues the goal of acceleration in all facets of our life. In the realm of public discourse, the book and the essay have given way to the tweet and the shortform video; the sentence has been supplanted by the bullet point; the critique by the meme; the considered opinion by the hashtag, and so on. Our lives are spent increasingly in digital spaces, which are themselves designed to be as addictive as possible and as riddled with distracting, loud, noisy advertisements and distractions as its users will tolerate. Such a world militates against exactly the kind of concentrated thought we need to thrive.
The design of this site reflects the concerns that led to its creation. When you visit this site, you are presented with a question – nothing more. No ads, no autoplaying videos, no answers provided by other users, not even, at first, a place to write an answer. The minimalist aesthetic is meant to help you zero in on the question before you. You have all the time in the world to pen your answer. Only after you have written and submitted your answer will you see answers provided by other users. This ensures that your answer constitutes your response to the question, rather than your response to others’ responses. Furthermore, while you can up-vote answers that speak to you, there is no down-voting, and no responding to others’ answers. This is done to prevent the answer section from devolving into the kind of nastiness that is the tragic hallmark of online discussion threads. Each answer given is one person’s offering to the community; it is neither an entry in a contest nor an invitation for criticism from others.
My Promises to You
- You own your data. If any time you wish to have any or all of your answers removed, you can by filling out this contact form. Furthermore, you can download your answers at any time on your profile page. See our privacy policy for full details.
- I will do my best to moderate comments to prevent spam, answers that don’t really respond to the question, and general rudeness and nastiness. This is a solo venture, and I don’t have any official content moderation policy, but I generally expect people not to be jerks here.
- I do not collect anything more than the bare minimum information necessary to make this site functional (i.e. tracking logins so you can answer questions with a registered account). I do not run any ads, nor do I collect any sort of analytics data on this site. I have no reason to, since this is strictly a labor of love whose sole purpose is to provide value to you, my community members.
What Does the Site Name Mean?
The name “Moon in a Dewdrop” is paraphrased from a poem by the 13th-century Zen master Dogen:
To what shall
I liken the world?
Moonlight, reflected
In dewdrops,
Shaken from a crane’s bill.
This poem captures the core of Dogen’s philosophy of life. Everyone and everything is ephemeral and insubstantial. Although this may at first blush seem to be a sad, even nihilistic way of looking at things, Dogen’s view is that it is only when you accept the ephemerality and insubstantiality of all things that you can truly behold their profound value and ineffable beauty.