Suggestions for Introspection

Each of the questions brings up a topic for introspection, and then for discussion with others. I suggest that you examine your reactions to each question with several meta-questions in mind.

All of the questions are intentionally simplistic. I don't expect that you will give an unqualified "yes" or "no" answer to many of them. Before you can answer "Do people ever change?" (Question 2), for example, you might need to make distinctions about the types of people, or the kinds of changes. In answering "Are the good things in life rare?" (Question 1), you may need to discuss several kinds of "good things" separately. Do whatever you need to do to make the question interesting and answerable. This preliminary categorizing and exception-making can tell you as much about yourself as your answer does. And so the first question-about-the-questions is:

A. What qualifications and distinctions do I need to make in order to give a meaningful answer to this question?
I tried to choose questions that are (on the one hand) too sweeping to have definitive answers, but which (on the other hand) have too many practical implications to ignore. Some people, for example, go months at a time without needing to know whether they believe in God. But the extent to which you can trust other people (Question 8) comes up daily. Some answer to Question 8 (and, I hope, to all the questions) is implicit in the way you live your life. And so the second meta-question is:
B. Does the answer I give when I think about this question match the answer that is implicit in my life? In other words, do I live as if I believed my conscious opinion?

Most of us have come to our answers piecemeal, evolving them gradually in response to our life experience. There probably was not any single moment when you decided to look at the world this way. (If you had such a moment and are willing to share it, chances are it would be a wonderful contribution to the discussion.) The third meta-question addresses this issue:

C. What would my life be like if I had a completely different answer to this question, and lived according to that answer? Would I be a better person, a worse one, or just different?

Many of us apply different standards to ourselves than we apply to others. For example, it might never occur to us to criticize another person for living an "average" life (Question 4), while at the same time we feel ashamed of our own ordinariness. Or we might believe that the world will forgive other people their shortcomings (Question 3), while at the same time not trusting it to forgive our own. This is the subject of the fourth meta-question:

D. Would I recommend my answer to someone else? Do I believe that the world works this way for other people also, or just for me? If I heard another person expressing this same belief, would I encourage him/her or would I argue?