All major religions and philosophical thought about living and being are attempts to make man into a perfect being, to be a good person, and as a result to project these morals towards one’s fellow man in order to help them do the same.

I perceive that your philosophical framework is an attempt to find minimal ethical strategies to define a well-lived life unto itself for oneself.

You focus on suffering and pleasure as hedons do, and even your questioning now feels like a Monte Carlo iteration of furthering this goal.

You don’t define concepts of good or bad, righteous or evil, outside of what harms the self without concern for others.

You seek to imitate instead of search for ground truth but you use first principle concepts from your own lived experience which doubtlessly derives from concepts you no longer remember the origin of but are stemmed in Western civilization thought.

Yet instead of deriving your first principles from morals, you derive them from pleasure.

You are thusly immoral.

Are you capable of moral behavior? Surely. And I’m sure in the day-to-day no one would think twice about interactions with you as a person.

But as one explores worldly terrain and maps the hills and valleys of the earth, subsequent and progressive meaningful interactions with immoral people yield the voids of the heart.

> I've found that studying others is a reliable way to discover truth and beauty

But you can't look in somebody's head, to see the whole context of their behaviour. There is multiple official cognitive flaws related to this. Humans are very bad at reading others minds and good at hiding their intentions. Think about a typical suicidal person who appears happy and smiling but then... well, you hear the bad news.