PERSONAL GROWTH WITHOUT ILLUSIONS!
David Hume
Historian, Philosopher and Essayist
David Hume was an 18th-century Scottish philosopher who basically looked at the world and said, ‘Certainty? Only in death and five o'clock tea.’ Born in Edinburgh in 1711, he dropped out of law school because he found it too boring — and decided, like all daring young men, to make a living writing philosophy (spoiler: it didn't work out very well at first).
Hume poked at everything: religion, the notion of cause and effect, and even the idea that we have a ‘fixed identity’ — according to him, we are just a bunch of sensations parading around without much coherence. He was snubbed academically, but his An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding and other texts became essential references in modern philosophy. He died in 1776, at peace with life and without fear of the afterlife, leaving behind a legacy that is half sharp reasoning, half Enlightenment trolling.