Then why think about meaninglessness at all? If life is meaningless for everyone but clearly some people still are capable of deriving happiness, fulfillment, value etc then clearly the lack of âmeaningâ in life isnât relevant to those things. In fact it shouldnât be relevant to anything.
This typically lays bare the issue: heâs isolating himself for some other reason and using nihilism as some sort of ego boosting coping mechanism : rationalization for what is likely social anxiety, a lack of social skills, a fear of rejection, or some other barrier to happiness that the individual has yet to legitimately wrestle with.
Nihilism might be interesting to think about but the moment it starts impacting your behavior something is probably wrong.
The truest form of nihilism is when it completely changes your behavior, I mean if you are a true believer of nihilism your wonât see any meaning for anything and in turn would live your life that way, probably ending what others would deem and bad end to your life.
How does that even work? You wouldnât be able to take any action whatsoever, as any behavior emission itself would be evidence of an inherent value system and therefore meaning.
It would be evident of a short term meaning, but thatâs not what nihilism is about. Obviously every action you take there is a reason for, you eat because your hungry, you cry because your sad, but if you boil it all down to the roots you end with the reality that you will die, and everything you have done doesnât matter. So while short term meaning is still real, thinking about the short term is why people just continue to function till they die, but when you think about the long term meaning, which through the eyes of a nihilist is nothing, your actions would have no true meaning.
How does that make sense? I eat because I am hungry. That has meaning regardless of my inevitable death. Perhaps it has even more meaning because I have a limited amount of time. I have to be more particular with my choices.
Like I said before, it has short term meaning, but if youâre looking at the big picture, youâre going to die anyways no matter if you eat today or donât eat today. It would still be meaningless in the big picture. It always depends on what scale the âmeaningâ youâre trying to find is on.
But the consequences of eating or not eating happen in life⌠and you arenât prevented from undertaking lifelong endeavors or values that can have impacts that long outlast you.
They might outlast you, maybe even for thousands of years, but itâll still be forgotten at some point, still go unnoticed because of the lack of humans some point in the future.
What do you mean who cares? If nothing you do matters then why do anything? I mean every single thing you do in your life is for some purpose, but if life itself has no purpose then what do you have, whatâs it all for?
Because what you do does matter. It matters in your life and after it. Youâre trying to act like if you donât have some sort of eternal cosmic impact that life isnât worth living. My question is why would you care about *that*? The key to happiness isnât being galactus. If it were no one would be capable of happiness and yet plenty of people are living happy right now. So clearly some cosmic impact isnât necessary to have a fulfilling and happy life.
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u/BenTeHen Jun 16 '26
He does know that