Living in an Ethical Airbnb: Descartes, Doubt, and the Mirrors of Self/God

What if the search for certainty isn’t about finding truth — but reflecting it?

Descartes once said that just as we can’t demolish an entire city in one go to rebuild it from scratch, we can’t suddenly toss out our entire belief system either. But to renovate the house of the mind, we must temporarily live somewhere else. That temporary dwelling, according to him, is a set of provisional moral principles — an ethical Airbnb, if you will — where one resides until the storm of philosophical doubt passes and solid foundations are laid.

To me, this idea feels strikingly similar to the conscious adoption of beliefs by self-aware people in search of peace. Like choosing to be religious, or building a personal value system in a world where absolutes are nowhere to be found. It’s not blind faith — it’s intentional refuge.

Descartes laid down four such temporary principles:

1. Obey the laws and customs of your own land and the traditions closest to you.

   He trusted what he knew and what had proven functional. He avoided overly theoretical or foreign ethics (like distant philosophies) because he couldn’t reliably test their value in practice.

   
   

2. Be firm in action and stick to your decisions — even when certainty is lacking.

   For Descartes, indecision was worse than being wrong. He used the metaphor of someone lost in a forest: if they never pick a path and walk it with resolve, they’ll perish. Any direction is better than standing still and dying.

   
   

3. Master yourself — through desire regulation.

   He taught himself to only want what lay within his control. That way, he wouldn’t grieve for what was out of reach. Nobody mourns not having wings like birds; it’s an accepted limitation. In the same way, he wanted to train himself not to be emotionally dependent on external events. Rather than reshaping the world, he aimed to reshape his own desires.

   
   

4. Devote yourself to philosophy and the pursuit of truth — but in moderation.

   Until certainty arrived, he would live by these temporary rules. Meanwhile, he would pursue truth with care. Life should be dedicated to seeking meaning, but not at the expense of simply living.

This kind of self-discipline offers a strange kind of serenity — what the Stoics called autarkeia: an inner peace unanchored from the external world. A harmony with one’s limitations that dissolves longing for what isn’t ours.

All of this resonated deeply with me. Descartes lived by these principles for nine years before embarking on a journey to learn from the world and its people. In most encounters, he took the role of an observer. Doubt was his metaphorical forest; certainty, the clearing he hoped to find within it.

But then something changed.

In the very treatise where he claims to have finally reached certainty, a paradox appears. Descartes uses the very thing he’s trying to prove — reliable reason — as the tool to prove itself. He wants certainty, and to get there, he needs to prove that God exists. But to prove God, he must trust his reasoning faculties. It’s a loop — a snake eating its tail. And yet, he confidently declares: I have found certainty!

“The Self, Refracted: Unity through Fragmented Mirrors”

He concludes that God exists, and that a soul placed in us by God is distinct from the body — two separate substances. But to me, this feels like assuming the conclusion. He claims that the idea of a perfect being must have been planted in us by something more perfect than we are — yet it is us, the supposedly imperfect beings, who arrive at that conclusion. It’s like conjuring something out of nothing, which even he admits is absurd.

To me, what Descartes tries to prove through logic feels more like spiritual intuition retrofitted into reason. That “idea of God” he felt at the beginning of his journey simply took on a more logical shape as he progressed — mainly to validate something he already felt was true.

But I see it differently.

I think meaning only emerges in contrast: light with shadow, understanding with confusion, freedom with captivity. Absolute unity must fracture in order to perceive itself. It must cast itself into mirrors to glimpse its own form from different angles. These mirrors are us: bodies, conscious individuals. Each mirror reflects only a fragment, a single angle — not the whole.

Each person, then, is a localized experience of absolute awareness. The flaw Descartes saw in human existence — used as a stepping stone to posit God — might instead be a sign of our partial perspective on unity, not proof of separation from it. We’re mirrors reflecting only part of the light. And without the experience of individuality, unity could never know itself. Our lives are the way God — or unity, or being — experiences limitation from the inside.

So for me, the essential question isn’t whether God exists. It’s realizing that maybe we are God — scattered mirrors of a singular, infinite reality. This aligns with my inner intuition: if we’re all reflections of a shared truth, then knowing God isn’t about abstract deduction — it’s about connection. Like how we never really know a person until we’ve seen them from many angles. The more honest, unfiltered mirrors we offer each other, the clearer the reflection becomes. Maybe that’s our shared journey — to arrange these mirrors, so that the light we come from can shine clearer through us.

And maybe — just maybe — everything we experience is a dream. A simulation that feels more real than reality. Like someone on Zolpidem, doing tangible things, they forget completely. Could we be living in something like that? Could Descartes’s search for certainty be unfolding in a dream that only feels real?

In the end, while Descartes begins his journey with raw honesty and a genuine desire for truth, he seems to end it trapped in a circular logic that offers no real escape — and no true certainty.

But maybe that’s okay.

Maybe certainty isn’t something we arrive at.

Maybe it’s something we reflect — together.