The Nihilism Thread

I’m a nihilist and I find that a lot of people have an immediate, negative gut-reaction to that outlook (including on this forum, when everyone attacked me for encouraging it in someone that obviously wasn’t enjoying the meaning that society says we’re supposed to find in life) and I don’t get why. I don’t see how anyone could possibly believe that life has any intrinsic meaning, but more than that, I don’t see why it’s good or uplifting to believe that life has meaning. I just think, and perhaps this is a personality quirk of mine, that if life did have meaning then it’s just more depressing when everything inevitable fucks up. If life has no intrinsic meaning, then it also doesn’t matter how you ruin or waste your life. Any meaning that you or I find in life is unique and meaningful only to you or I. Whatever meaning I gleam from something is something I’ve attributed to it, not something in it that I’ve discovered. Any good thing that I do and that other people find meaningful is something that is meaningful because it touched other people in an apparently beneficial way rather than it being some deed of cosmic significance. I find that kind of pleasant. Why don’t other people find that comforting? I don’t get it.

Any good thing that I do and that other people find meaningful is something that is meaningful because it touched other people in an apparently beneficial way rather than it being some deed of cosmic significance. I find that kind of pleasant.

I think that is a good reason to forsake the emptiness of nihilism. If there were no intrinsic meaning in life, then attributing meaning to it and getting pleasure from it would seem highly desirable and itself meaningful.

Handman said:

Any meaning that you or I find in life is unique and meaningful only to you or I. Whatever meaning I gleam from something is something I’ve attributed to it, not something in it that I’ve discovered. Any good thing that I do and that other people find meaningful is something that is meaningful because it touched other people in an apparently beneficial way rather than it being some deed of cosmic significance.

This doesn’t sound like nihilism to me. This may seem like an odd question, but your wording prompts it. Were you by chance raised in a religious household?

Not really. A couple older siblings raised me for the most part till I was about 13 and then I was a loner until I was 17 and graduated.

I should’ve phrased it better. I was trying to say that any meaning found in something isn’t intrinsic in the thing itself, because everything is meaningless. Whatever meaning found in something is relevant only to the person that thinks it’s there.

This certainly meets with my own world view in many respects…yet I do somehow manage to at times even go so far as to enjoy this brief pause between birth and death…although often it is quite challenging to find a purpose in allowing one day to follow the next…for one day I shall depart and very few will have noticed the difference…

Sure. I slept for almost nineteen hours yesterday and no one noticed.

I saw it and I laughed.

Post Praetorian said:

This certainly meets with my own world view in many respects…yet I do somehow manage to at times even go so far as to enjoy this brief pause between birth and death…although often it is quite challenging to find a purpose in allowing one day to follow the next…for one day I shall depart and very few will have noticed the difference…

Were your responses to mfm in the other thread representative of your own views.

No.

Nah, I just know the answer to that question.

How?

I have a strong feeling based on what I remember about him.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gjh-nFCfp2s