HONEST TO BLOG

Freelance Worldview Consultant

I heard a report that the U.S. suicide rate is currently double that of homicide (2001 NIMH data). Apparently, suicide has been on the rise.

Now I would venture to say that most of these people probably weren't killing themselves out of some sense of religious zeal. Quite the contrary. I could imagine that among those who gave it serious thought many came to philosophical dead-ends about life.

The New York Times Magazine recently printed a story about a "philosophical counselor." The number of such practitioners is growing. There's an increasing awareness that some of our deepest troubles are not, after all, emotional. Some of them are actually philosophical.

This is reminiscent of my part-time job. Since I never bothered to get business cards, a lot of you don't know that I work as a Worldview Consultant. Of course, it's strictly pro bono at this point. But, somewhere down the road, I hope to develop an online preliminary worldview identification test to draw-in paying consultees.

[You know, several such questionnaires already exist for political ideology. Check them out.]

After one's current basic life-orientation is identified via the worldview test, I devise a more specialized, in-depth list of questions and topics for discussion. Depending on how far a client wants to go, and in which direction, I make particular recommendations for ways that one might continue to live an examined life.

No foolin'.