The Perfect App…

or “Isn’t That a Familiar Tune?”

I realize that I’ve spent a lot of time in silence with myself lately, and I’ve had a little self debate about what to call this blog (I say little because I mean that in the literal sense!). I came to the conclusion that it probably is a little more self serving when it is more elusive.

As time passes, I think that the hardest part for anyone is the “growing up” phase. No matter how well we think we cope with it, ultimately, it is a super difficult thing to do because we tend to overthink and try to make life something separate from personal identity. This is not to say that we don’t grow up as ourselves; rather, I think that as humans growing up in today’s society such as it is, we tend to neglect the values which make us who we are, and act, in some ways, insincerely.

In a paper that I wrote for a seminar on the topic of personhood and the metaphysics of persons, I suggest that “what it is to be a person is just that some being has the
present or future potential to interact with the world in a morally meaningful way, and is able to make moral judgments about other interactions.” Granted, the paper itself may not be very good, the case still stands that one is a person if they can act with moral reason. This alone is an important idea, I think; we tend to say that people who kill just for shits and giggles are “monsters.” We say the same for serial killers too. Another interesting claim that people seem to make is that people who do good for amoral reasons are shallow (such as celebrities who give money to charities, and whom we judge as acting on the grounds of getting noticed). There’s a certain quality of human sincerity and moral meaningfulness that is implicit within “being human” as we might understand it, and without that we can’t really ever overcome the challenges of the “growing up” phase.

So why did I title this post “The Perfect App” and what does it have to do with anything? I got to thinking earlier that if I were an app programmer for mobile devices like the iPhone or Android, I would probably code something that allows you to talk to yourself, but not just on a surface level. After reading Paolo Coelho’s The Alchemist, I wondered what people would be like if they could talk to their hearts. Then I realized that people now have a kind of “techjoy” fixation. They can’t do anything without a cellphone in hand, or a laptop in front of them. People just don’t care to spend the time to look at their own lives and see what their hearts have to offer them. So how about an app that lets you do that?

--Just a thought for a not so rainy day.