John Bliss

As a youth I was obsessed with finding the “meaning of life,” to the point that most of my peers found me strange. I had a deep conviction that there had to be a reason we are here. Once I knew that reason, I figured, I would know what to focus my efforts on. I was fixated on this for years, but eventually everyday life intervened. Most of those eccentric seekers, like me, at some point, are forced to deal with day-to-day reality. We all have rents or mortgages to pay, big bosses to avoid, childhood scars to overcome and romantic disasters to address. It is easy to get entangled into the game that ensnared everyone else. I sure did.

I set a goal to make enough money to retire and I worked at it, day in and day out, focusing on achieving material success. When you become material minded like that, thoughts about meaning are crowded out, as they cannot help you achieve your goals. There I was. I had joined the predominant schema. I became a man of the world, and I got good at it. But I have graduated from this portion of my life.

Yes, I started, ran and sold a company. It was well-respected and successful, but it was my trade. But it is the book that is most important to me. Over 13 years, I wrote "The False Paradigms of Today and the Timeless Truth of Tomorrow: Essays on Meaning." My editor ripped it up three times, and I rewrote it three times.

As I see it, the big problem is that we were put here on the planet without a rule book. We don't have an innate sense of purpose in our lives, or if we did once, it was obliterated by what we were taught by those around us. We look to religion, other people, and increasingly science to guide us, but unfortunately, they too are flawed. So what do we do?

The book challenges scientism (the view that everything must be proven by science), religion (because it was created by weak men), groups (because they warp our perceptions), logic (as it is cold and inhumane), and our own capacity to understand anything in the first place.  

But that is just the first half. Then it brings you to the same realization, which I won’t state, through several different avenues. It is better for you to come to the realization yourself, then you own it.

The Midwest Book Review called it "Original, eloquent, iconoclastic, thoughtful and thought-provoking."  

The book is written for the lay person, not the scholar, although there are hundreds of footnotes documenting sources.