Notes from a Pretend Philosopher

In October 2022 I created the X account ‘Wise1Philosophy’. I was previously on Twitter with an anonymous fitness account and my plan was to monetize this initial account as a second income.

Fitness is niche and I realized that unless you're going to sell a fitness product to your audience it is a taxing niche to monetize. I was interested in fitness, but this challenge made me rethink my focus and consider what else I was enthusiastic about.

So, why philosophy?  Good question!

Thousands of years ago Zeno created stoicism which was named after the type of porch he used to sit and teach at. From Zeno the Stoic grew five generations of stoics of real note and Marcus Aurelius was in the 5th generation.

Marcus Aurelius’ book Meditations is still the best non-fiction book I have had the great pleasure of reading and have read many, many times since. A book packed full of wisdom with words to deeply contemplate on each page.

Stoicism and philosophy as a passion grew from that original reading of Meditations and made my decision to change from fitness to philosophy a very simple choice.

As a young man, I read fictional books with the odd self-help book like Dale Carnegie's How to Win Friends and Influence People.  I was good at sports, but I was small, as in skinny, and I was told repeatedly throughout my school life that I was not big enough even though I was in all the school teams.

This led me to start reading books as escapism, and I haven’t stopped reading since.

I note with interest that content creators, just starting on X and wanting to grow an audience, see the process as a huge campaign that requires a war-like strategy to be successful. They could be right.

For me the process was different. I bumbled along and asked people for help and created a network of accounts in my niche. Then, I became extremely lucky with the algo which generated a huge audience for my account.

However, my X account is a side note as to why I am writing this eBook.

To create content for a growing audience I had to read, learn, and understand.

From reading people’s content and listening on Spaces (more about Spaces later) I am fully aware there is very little that I know and what I do know I constantly doubt.

So, I’m sharing what I have learned throughout my life, especially in the last year.

Starting with Note One - Entropy