What I Took From 2024
One Belief, One Behavior Change
I have grown into a fully blown minimalist. Which means, at the end of a year, I’m not looking for ten bullet points or a hundred lessons — I’m just looking for one or two insights. In this case, 2024 gave me exactly two things: a single sentence that completes my personal philosophy and a tiny behavioral change (I’ll cover the latter at the end, no peeking).
I’ve been working on a core philosophy — My Understanding — for the past three years. It’s something that originally felt like a loose collection of rules and reasonings about language, contradiction, and reality. And while it resonated with me, deeply, I also knew it wasn’t quite whole yet.
Then, just a couple nights before the year ended, I woke abruptly to a missing piece snapping into place.
It occurred to me that the statement “Everything is Nothing,” (drawn from Buddhism’s foundational axiom), ties a neat little bow on My Understanding.
I’ll take you straight to the premises and conclusion of the argument.
My Understanding
Everything is Nothing
Everything is a contradiction
Existence is a contradiction
Contradictions are reality markers — they give logic, time, position, movement to the truth
Relative truths are the building blocks of reality
To identify a contradiction is to witness a relative truth — an element of reality
To witness a relative truth is to communicate it
Communication is everything
The Missing Axiom
For a while, my list began with “Everything is a contradiction.” But alone, in the position of the first premise, it felt more like a strong hunch than a complete foundation.
So I had my little midnight epiphany and introduced “Everything is Nothing,” an axiom widely linked to Buddhist thought, to anchor My Understanding.
If everything is nothing, it follows that anything we claim to be “something” stands in contradiction with the underlying emptiness. Hence, every entity, concept, or claim is a contradiction by default — 2 and 3 now come alive.
My logic resonates with (and builds upon) older philosophical musings, from Heraclitus (everything flows and thus contradicts itself) to Zen Buddhism (the emptiness that underlies form). The crucial point is that, whether literally or metaphorically, “everything is nothing” makes the rest of the puzzle click.
A single line to organize my entire worldview. That’s probably why so many people love Buddhism, huh?
Tying It Together
Contradictions as reality markers (4) means we see tension points where ideas clash or break down. These tension points (like quantum “paradoxes” or moral dilemmas) reveal something about how the world works, forcing us to refine our map of reality.
Philosophers like Georg Hegel famously turned contradictions into engines of progress — dialectics to drive knowledge forward.
And if relative truths are the building blocks of reality (5), it means no single “absolute truth” stands uncontested. Newton’s laws were “true” until Einstein showed they were incomplete, and we might see more revisions down the road.
Each recognized contradiction (6) yields a new sliver of reality — a new relative truth, so to speak. Recognizing them demands we communicate, because sharing that sliver is how it becomes part of a collective understanding (7). It’s how we make shit make sense amongst ourselves.
To wrap up the argument, if communication is everything (8), it’s because no truth is realized in isolation. This notion echoes Wittgenstein, who argued that the limits of our language are the limits of our world.
Even the simplest observation — “This table is wooden” — lives or dies by our language, by our ability to confirm or dispute it collectively.
A Note on Language
What is language to you?
To me, “language” refers specifically to the sounds and movements we humans created to convey our thoughts to one another. I find it bemusing that we use language to define language. The more we try to describe it, the further we get into the weeds.
But on a practical level, language is critical to building a shared perception of the world. It helps us interact efficiently, scale our interactions across vast groups of people, and preserve a record of what we think we know.
All of this suggests that logic itself depends on language. We can’t define logic without words. We can’t share or verify logic outside some communicative structure. This is reminiscent of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s idea that the boundaries of thought are the boundaries of our linguistic capacity. If logic could stand alone outside of language, we wouldn’t be able to discuss or apply it.
This “logic-is-bounded-by-language” angle might feel tangential, but it’s part of why I build all these “rules” in plain text. I can’t prove them in any purely logical sense without words, and each term could be attacked on semantic grounds.
So, I anchor it in language. We can call it a vantage point, an axiom-laden worldview that demands the acceptance (or rejection) of the premise that everything is nothing (1).
Concrete Examples
Quantum Mechanics: Observers see contradictions in wave-particle duality, forcing new models to handle the tension.
Tech & AI: We see expansions in what’s “true” about reality (like LLMs upending old conceptions of “automation”), but each revelation births new contradictions on ethics, bias, and genuine understanding.
Everyday Morality: Our strongest moral statements often clash with other cultural or personal frameworks — contradictions abound. We fight or we converse. Communication seems to be the only real path forward.
The idea is: If “everything is nothing,” then everything is also contradictory, and from that contradiction we glean relative truths to share or debate.
Yep it’s messy — but when is being human not messy?
Final Musings
So what did I personally take away from 2024?
I finally nailed down that opening axiom — “Everything is Nothing.” It completes my little philosophical structure.
I’m not pooping with my phone anymore.
That’s it. One line that unifies my worldview, and one small tweak to my daily routine. Happy New Year.
About the Author
Sam Hilsman is the CEO of CloudFruit® & HiiBo. If you want to invest in HiiBo or oneXerp, reach out. If you want to become a developer ambassador for HiiBo, visit www.HiiBo.app/dev-ambassadors.