Before getting too far into a philosophical examine of the poopiness of life, I thought it would be worthwhile to introduce the subject matter of the work itself as well as the scope that this work will entail. It should be noted at the outset that this work is merely an exploratory and introductory work, which is ill-suited to a large and weighty tome, as is customary in most philosophical examinations. Instead, this will be a much shorter work that comes with the approach that it is only by understanding the fundamental realities of our human existence–an existence that involves both a subjective interior world that evaluates and judges reality as well as an objective exterior world that we must deal with and which places fundamental demands on us and also constrains our behavior–that we are able to understand our place within the world.

In particular, this work will argue that it is the physical nature of our physical existence that ensures that our existence is poopy for everyone, and that it cannot be any other way so long as human beings are physical beings. In addition, this work will argue that fundamental to the state of mankind’s unhappiness is the contradiction that exists between our interior and exterior worlds that we must simultaneously operate in and master if we are to live life successfully. The mismatch between our hopes and expectations of life and its reality, the mismatch between the relative ease at which we can imagine and hope for better and the immense difficulty of doing anything, the mismatch between how we see ourselves and how others see us, and between that which we think and that which we can communicate to others all contribute to a universal sense of tension and difficulty in the existence of people, no matter how well-off or privileged they may seem from the outside. None of us is immune from the fundamental nature of our existence and the limitations of what it means to be human, and no amount of effort on our part can eliminate those fundamental realities, try as we might.

In general, philosophy has tended to emphasize the mental and theoretical aspects of the interior mind, processes of pure logical reasoning, and has tended to deny the importance and often even the existence of the exterior physical world. Contemporary philosophical trends doubt the possibility that mankind can have any reliable information about others or about the exterior world and that there are no authorities that can properly regulate the interior world where we find freedom and seek to define reality from. Yet it is the same exterior world that philosophers often denigrate and deny that shapes our existence in fundamental aspects, and supplies also the only possibilities we have of obtaining real success in life, in which we hope to receive lasting appreciation from others, and where we hope to have a real and genuine effect on our lives and the lives of others. This work has no such aim in mind to attack the reality or the importance of the exterior world. Instead, it seeks to probe into the reality of our existence, its physicality, its waste and entropy, in order to demonstrate that we cannot understand ourselves without coming to grips with the kind of beings we are and the processes which determine our viability and the terms of our existence.

It is only by understanding the physical reality of our existence that we are able to come to grips with the gap between that reality and our thoughts and feelings and judgments about that reality. We will therefore begin this work by examining the physical reality of poopiness, which will take a broad but impressionistic series of sketches on various aspects of this reality in our lives over the course of a series of essays. As this is a philosophical work and not a scientific work, it will be absent of anything more quantitative than thought experiments, but because it deals with aspects of reality that are relatable by others, this ought to be no burden to those who wish to share in the explorations provided. It is after we have sufficiently explored the physical nature of external reality that we will examine the implications of this reality for our subjective interior existence. It is common for people to denigrate the importance of this realm, and equally common for people to exaggerate its importance, but we will seek to keep things in proportion. There are indeed serious and fundamental problems with the way that we see and judge the world from within our own castles built in the clouds of our imagination, but it is the only world we have by which we can perceive and evaluate, and so its existence is important even if its behavior is often troublesome.

After we have dealt with an examination of both physical and mental reality, there will be an appendix that contains an exploration of the scriptural significance of issues of poopiness that have been explored in the remainder of the work. This writer candidly admits to being a believer of the Bible–both the Hebrew scriptures as well as the New Testament–and also candidly admits that not all readers will be. Given that the work as a whole is designed to be as accessible as possible, it will be carried on a fundamentally generally and universally accessible level, but those readers who share the author’s own biblical interests will be able to find, with the appendix, further essays that explore the spiritual implications of the physical nature of mankind, as well as a tentative exploration of the life to come that believers eagerly await in the world to come.

If we take the work as a whole and examine it, we will therefore see three parts of the work that deal with three aspects of human existence. We will begin with mankind as a mortal being, a being whose organic existence has very real physical consequences that we all universally have to deal with in life. However inelegant it is to have to deal with this physical reality, and however much we might wish to avoid its implications and its limitations, we must first begin with the life we live before we can talk about what can be done about it. The second part of the book will then explore these implications and consequences of physical existence that deal with our mental and emotional reality, in which we spend most of our lives. It should be noted here that this mental existence is not limited to human beings alone. Indeed, it appears that fundamental to life in general is some kind of perception, however limited. This work does not pretend that human beings alone have feelings or have some sort of perception of the outside world or some kind of interior existence. If this writer dwells on human existence rather than on other sorts of existence, it is simply for the reason that as human beings, we understand ourselves best of all. This does not absolve us of the need to reach beyond our limiting and narrow perspective to appreciate others, and this matter will be discussed, but an exploration of the physicality of human life means a general but by no means exclusive focus on human beings. Rest assured, though, that our examination of poopiness will explore other lifeforms with a sense of appreciation in their sharing our existence with us. Third, there will be an additional exploration into the moral and spiritual aspects of the poopiness of human existence, an examination that not everyone will wish to appreciate but that is important to understanding not only the beings that we are but the beings that we wish and hope to become.