Some useful mental models

One of the benefits of reading philosophy is the ways of thinking and categorising it teaches you, which some people call mental models.

For example, from Aristotle we learn about essence and accident. Everything has qualities that are fundamental to what it is, and qualities that are accidental. For example, you can melt and re-shape gold as many times and in as many ways as you like, and it is still gold. Shape is accidental to gold, not essential. This way of thinking was commonplace until recently among all educated people, and you can see how it applies broadly.

Or how about the epistemic problem, which states that we cannot know with any certainty the consequences of our actions. "All the evidence available at the time of acting may have pointed to the conclusion that a given act was the right act to perform – and yet it may still turn out that what you did had horrible results, and so in fact was morally wrong. Indeed, if will never be possible to say for sure that any given act was right or wrong, since any event can continue to have further unseen effects down through history." You may not agree with that, but there's room for more people to have bigger doubts about their actions right now.

Ends and means, the subject of Zena Hitz's book Lost in Thought (on which, more soon), helps us distinguish between those actions that we pursue for their own sake, and those which are a means to an end. So many unhappy people have completely confused those two categories and are doing very little for its own sake.

There's also the roughness principle, long-term thinking, flow and stock, proleptic reasons and many others. Yes, they are all useful and applicable, but more importantly, they will help you understand the world. I'm not suggesting you play truant for six years to study Spinoza, but it's worth thinking about.