And That's My New Philosophy!

My brother has a bunch of friends who love to snowboard, so he went snowboarding, too. Unfortunately, his friends love to snowboard. They don’t love to teach other people how to snowboard.

So, upon arrival, they suited him up, pointed him at the nearest tall, snowy thing, and headed on down the hill.

My brother had watched them go, and he thought, “How hard can it be? It’s just gravity.” Famous last words, my friend.

So he pushes off, picking up speed far faster than he expected or thought possible. After a brief period, his speed goes from kind of exciting to pretty much terrifying. The impetus for this change? It has occurred to him that he doesn’t know how to stop.

As he ponders the physics of snowboarding, he notices that, not only are the trees passing him really fast, but there are people up ahead. Like, a LOT of people.

Now, despite my brother’s apparently tenuous grasp of physics in action, he knows enough to know that if he crashes into a huge group of people, he will get really hurt and maybe crush a bystander’s important internal organs. If, on the other hand, he crashes into a non-sentient entity, he’ll pretty much be suffering alone.

Seeing how the good of the many outweighs the good of the one*, he decides to take one for the team, and stop himself. Running into a tree doesn’t sound that thrilling, so he figures that if he just lays down, flat on his back, he will get a lot of bruise, but skid to a halt relatively quickly and painlessly.

Remember how my brother’s not the president of physics?

So he flops down on his back, but his momentum is such that he promptly finds himself on his head, then his feet, then his head, then his feet, and then, finally, his back. He is very sore.


When he told this story, everyone in the room was laughing at his misfortune, and he laughed along with us. I commented that he probably hadn’t laughed much at the time. He said that he had too laughed, and then he shared his philosophy:

He said that whenever something lousy happens to him, he thinks, “But would I laugh if I saw it in a movie?” And if he would laugh at the movie, he laughs at himself.

My brother is an awesome philosopher.