To live is to suffer, to survive is to find some meaning in the suffering. - Friedrich Nietzsche
There is no reason to living than living itself. I have lived with philosophy of nihilism since I was a young boy. Ingrained systematically into me by conditioning and a lifetime of reasoning around it. Nothing matters, and I could not be happier at the idea.
When I was a boy, I grew up in a very structured military household. Busy children were good children. Good children were busy children. We went to church every Wednesday, Saturday, and Sunday. School 5 days a week. Parents worked split 12h shifts alternating between day and night. Which left me under a very rigorous schedule. Every time accounted for, every task accounted by time. This changed by the time I was about 8 and I began to wonder "Why?". I was often left to the whims of the schedule, the schedule meant everything, and the tasks in was my function. With this, even as a child, you begin to lose meaning in the task itself and just go through the motions. You went to church, you went to school, you went home to do more tasks. And as a child would, I made bold exclamations of "When I am older I will never... bla bla... cake every night." My parents being the military law and order as they were, also were pragmatists, things we did had function and reason behind them, To a point of fault however, if the function no longer served the same purpose, it was long needed. If something would replace a thing and serve the same function or better, it was replaced. And in order to big brain myself out of the schedule I was forced to do something children are universally bad at, reason my way out.
In order to reason myself out of this rigor was forced into "acting out" but I could not simply pull a tantrum, if that was to be met with a firm punishment of moving heavy objects that needed moving and solitary. Not a simple grounding, a full set of solitary for minimum 3 days. TVs removed, bed stripped to a pillow and blanket, all things not school related to be removed from the room. Meals served at the door, and blinds on the windows should always be drawn. So to prevent this punishment I can not tantrum, be unreasonable, or be physically uncooperative. I can however do the one thing kids are good at, ask a lot of questions. So began, what many consider a dark path, to nihilism. It began with church, asking questions like "What id God?", "Why God matters?", "What is evil?" etc... pretty much the most basic introductory questions any kid would ask of religion. As I asked more questions, the more upset the church leaders were at my behavior, the more complaints to my parents, and the less I went to church. It worked, and I have been asking questions similar ever since. With the freedom to strip meaning away from previous functions, I was also equally free to determine my own meaning to new functions, so long as they met a similar value.
Nihilism is a philosophical view, or family of views, that is typically associated with negation of one or more types of value. It may be that there is no ultimate morality, that there is nothing that exists beyond the material world. That human life, emotion, and existence is fundamentally meaninglessness. It is a bitter pill to swallow for many, but with the advent of a materialistic scientific spearhead that is the modern day, more and more people feel they have to swallow it. This is what philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche referred to as the “crisis of meaning”. The widespread advent of nihilism.
But there is another side of nihilism, or rather, another attitude you could take toward it. The shiny light bordering the darkness of the abyss. If nothing ultimately matters, we are free to do anything. Our social obligations, moral molds, and mental hang ups dissolve into the abyss. You can either take that liberation and dive into anarchy and hedonism or you take it and run the other way, toward authenticity. Completely free to be what we are, not what we “must” be. When the mold does not matter, you can be any shape of cookie you would like to be, so long as baked in the same oven that is life.
Positive Nihilism, a evolution of the original philosophy. Nihilism’s ideas become an affirmation of life rather than a negation of it. David Hume, the Scottish philosopher, serves as a good model for this. An atheist and committed skeptic, Hume was pessimistic about the prospect that humanity had an overarching purpose in this universe. Despite his philosophical stance, he was famously cheery. When the writer James Boswell came to visit him on his deathbed, he was surprised to find at how well prepared Hume seemed to be. Telling jokes, playing cards, conversing with friends. Adam Smith, among Hume’s closest friend, wrote a controversial letter in which he said Hume, an unbeliever, came “as nearly to the idea of a perfectly wise and virtuous man, as perhaps the nature of human frailty will permit.”
In much of the time since it's inception, nihilists have always been looked down upon as the doomer, the dead-end to philosophy, and the should be depressed incel. They have nothing, they enjoy nothing, and wake up tired of living every day but continue to do so out of fear of death itself.
Imagine you lose everything you have all your success and security are taken from you. Smile at this. Imagine you never find a person to love and who will love you in return. Smile at this. Imagine the person or people you do love is taken from you, leaves, or dies. Smile at this. Imagine the planet itself goes dead, barren, and no life survives. Smile at this.
A silver lining around the abyss.
But if adapted correctly you can be charismatic, you can have a great job, you can have a wife and children. You can wake up happy, enjoy a drink on the weekends, and revel in the idea that perhaps one day you will die. Bask in the chaos of the uncaring universe.
At first it will be difficult. A grin of madness comes off the same in polite conversation than a chuckle at an unfunny joke. But smile on. A mysterious smile that sees past all things, both joy and sorrow, love and loss, death and time. It is not an easy smile. It may take a long time to get comfortable with it. But once you do, your attitude toward suffering and loss may forever change and you may, as Rudyard Kipling said: “meet with triumph and disaster. And treat those two impostors just the same.”
Meaninglessness is my meaning to living. I do, not because I must, but because I can.
