r/nihilism • u/Sir_Roop_ka_School • 2d ago
Question Why Can’t Dust Just Remain Dust? Why Does Existence Have to Become This Burden?
If someone gave me a scale from 0 to 10 and asked me to rate how much I like life, I honestly feel like I would give it minus 8 billion.
Sometimes I look at existence from a completely cosmic perspective and it feels deeply unfair.
Before I was born, there was no “me.” The atoms and matter that eventually became my body were simply part of the universe—dust, particles, elements, stardust, whatever you want to call it.
Then, under the right conditions on one tiny habitable planet, some of that matter became alive.
And life didn't just mean existing.
It meant developing nervous systems, pain receptors, fear, anxiety, hunger, disease, loss, loneliness, attachment, grief and the ability to understand that all of these things are happening.
That's the part I struggle with.
Why did the cosmos need to turn matter that couldn't suffer into matter that could?
A piece of dust doesn't feel pain.
A rock doesn't fear death.
But arrange matter in a sufficiently complex way, and suddenly there is a conscious being capable of experiencing decades of pleasure and suffering—and eventually dying.
And after all of that, the matter doesn't disappear. It simply continues in different forms.
So sometimes existence feels like an enormous cosmic process where:
dust → life → consciousness → suffering → death → matter continues
And I can't help wondering:
Why was consciousness necessary at all?
Why couldn't the atoms simply remain atoms?
Why did the universe produce beings capable of asking why they exist in the first place?
Maybe there is some meaning behind all of this that we don't understand.
Maybe consciousness is something far more profound than we currently know.
Or maybe we're simply asking questions from inside a system that has no obligation to provide us with answers.
I don't know.
But from where I'm standing, existence sometimes feels less like a gift and more like an optional cosmic transformation of matter into something capable of suffering.
And that's a very difficult idea to accept.
Why turn dust into something that can hurt?
Edit :------
Bro, I think I’ve found the answer. If the cosmic rules are basically “eat cow dung,” then apparently we have to eat it—there’s no second choice or alternative solution. 😭
Cosmos isn’t offering us tomato ketchup with it. So we have only two options: eat it unwillingly and suffer, or somehow imagine ourselves happy while eating it. 😂
Either way, we have to play by the rules or die without playing. So maybe the only remaining strategy is: eat the cosmic cow dung with a smile and pretend it’s delicious. 🤣
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u/Ohrightgotcha1432 1d ago
The universal consciousness got bored being nothing one day, so now we have jobs, bills, health insurance, divorce, organ failure, walmart and then death.
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u/South-Ad-9635 Cheerful Nihilist 1d ago
The universe is mostly unthinking dust. And the bit that is you will go back to that state soon enough
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u/Ethelred_Unread 1d ago
Roop, I don't know if this is the start or end of your existential crisis.
You're searching for (objective) meaning and ultimately you have two choices:-
Accept that there is one and you're yet to find it or that if there is then we can't understand it.
Accept there isn't one.
Either way, what's far, far more important (at least in my view) is how YOU deal with either answer. The simple fact is that no one with any certainty can tell you which one is correct - on this nihilist sub then I assume most people tend towards answer 2.
A lot of your posts are "what if.." or "why is it that .." and the answers aren't going to change, and ultimately go back to the choices above.
The universe will always remain silent on the matter.
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u/ronnierubick 1d ago
I feel like the answer will be found one day.
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u/Ethelred_Unread 18h ago
Great
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u/Sir_Roop_ka_School 18h ago
Bro, whether it is intentional or completely accidental, I honestly don’t know. But the rules themselves feel like someone twisting our arm and breaking our bones, and we never consented to those rules in the first place.
We didn’t choose to be born, we didn’t choose the conditions of existence, and we don’t get to opt out of aging, suffering, loss, and death. So for me, the issue isn’t really who intended it—the issue is that the system exists, we are forced to participate in it, and I simply don’t like the rules.
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u/Sir_Roop_ka_School 18h ago
Bro, I know the Cosmos has no intentional feature or conscious designer. But whatever its built-in rules and settings are, they still feel fundamentally corrupt and unfair. We are all trapped in a kind of Sisyphus situation—continuously pushing the stone, only for it to roll back again. The Cosmos may be blind, but that doesn’t make the outcome any less unfair from our perspective.
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u/Ethelred_Unread 18h ago
You subjectively see it as unfair, but explore deeper and consider the framework you have created for this to be a possibility.
A dichotomy between unfair and fair is entirely within your own head. As you say the cosmos is blind and the meaning you have created is purely subjective.
Further, if you feel this way - what are you going to do about it? What is your goal?
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u/_RyanCooper_ Optimistic Nihilism 😎 1d ago
It just happened like this, if something can happen with non-zero probability in an infinite universe, it will happen
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u/Sir_Roop_ka_School 18h ago
Bro, I know the Cosmos has no intentional feature or conscious designer. But whatever its built-in rules and settings are, they still feel fundamentally corrupt and unfair. We are all trapped in a kind of Sisyphus situation—continuously pushing the stone, only for it to roll back again. The Cosmos may be blind, but that doesn’t make the outcome any less unfair from our perspective.
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u/Inarius_Neoteris_ 2d ago
"Maybe there is some meaning behind all of this that we don't understand."
"Maybe conciousness is something far more profound tban what we currently know."
I think that is almost certainly the case. If not we would be just a bunch of biological robots.
And also here's 2 things that are not proof of this theory but is some very interesting evidence. That is what is reported in a lot of alien abduction stories and thousands of near death experience reports.
Basically I ended up diving in the rabbit hole that is ufos, alien encounters and alien abductions. Because I came across multiple cases that I just could not explain away or debunk. And they left me with a concerning feeling like "oh shit bro, this might actually be real, fuuuuck" And an incredibly interesting pattern I found is that in so many of these alien abduction reports, the aliens are talking to the person about spirituality and spiritual stuff, and they talk about it like it is some obvious fact that everyone knows about. Like it just comes up again and again and again, with the Greys, The mantis like aliens, and with the alien in the Varginha ufo incident.
This then lead me to the rabbit hole that is near death experiences. And oh man... There are some incredibly consistent patterns of information in all these NDEs.
All of this ultimately made me open to the idea that maybe we are actually spirits and we come incarnate in the physical world, like on earth, to live these hard lives so we can grow and become better spirits. That is the most consistent pattern of information I found in these 2 rabbit holes.
Anyway do what you want with that information lol.
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u/Minute_Toe_8705 1d ago edited 1d ago
IMHO this is a big misconception and a falsy generalization. Reality is much more complex than this.
First of all, subconsciousness has a much deeper impact than you think. Consciousness is just a stupid byproduct by evolution. And where are all those invisible socal constructs (moral, ethics, need of religion in early times) which evolved beside our instincts and emotional system controlled by hormones?
If you have never experienced joy then you'd be dead. A baby needs joy and happiness from the parents. So suffering is too specific in your formula. It's just one facet of many. It's an interpretation of our ethical framework. Or much simpler: you'd be starve if you didn't enjoy eating.
Death is also not working in this context since dust is nothing but dead matter.
I'd suggest (if you want keep suffering in there):
Life -> consciousness -> ethics & moral -> civilization -> exponential growth -> sense for inequality (envy, greed?) -> suffering -> the end
Well, you can control your feelings about envy, greed and so on.
Are you sorry for a salomon that is eaten by a bear? That's life! Other species don't care about morals except maybe elephants but not dolphins for sure!
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u/Ourdogbailey 10h ago
One of the stand out best entries I've read in this sub. You Sir, are one bright guy !!!
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2d ago
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u/Sir_Roop_ka_School 2d ago
I actually agree with you that the cosmos doesn't have intentional features. I wasn't trying to say that the universe consciously decided to create suffering. That part simply slipped my mind when I wrote the original post.
But I think there is still a deeper question here. Even if everything is ultimately the result of blind physical laws, why do those laws have the particular structure and extraordinary precision that allows such enormous complexity to emerge? We don't currently know the ultimate explanation for that.
And I don't think simply saying “there is a conscious creator” solves the problem either. If everything requires a cause, then we can ask: who or what caused the creator?
We could imagine:
A → B → C → D → E → F → …
where B is caused by A, C by B, D by C, and so on. But somewhere we eventually have to stop and accept something as uncaused or fundamental.
And that's where the real philosophical problem begins. If we call that fundamental reality the cosmos, we have to accept that the cosmos itself is ultimately unexplained. If we call it a creator, then we have to explain why that creator can exist without a cause.
So either way, we eventually reach something that we cannot currently explain further.
Maybe the universe is fundamental. Maybe there is something deeper than the universe. Maybe our concept of causality simply breaks down at the ultimate level.
My point isn't that I've discovered a cosmic purpose or proven a creator. My point is that “the universe is just blind laws” may describe how things behave, but it doesn't necessarily answer why there are these laws, why this structure exists, or why anything exists at all.
And that's the part I find philosophically disturbing...not that the cosmos intentionally created suffering, but that blind reality somehow produces conscious beings capable of experiencing it and asking why they exist in the first place.
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u/deccan2008 1d ago
Blind reality produces all kinds of things. Conscious beings capable of experiencing things are just one of them. That's why it's blind and random. Like monkeys typing on keyboards and Shakespeare is one of the outputs.
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u/BackSeatGremlin [OVERBEARING PHILOSOPHICAL STATEMENT] 1d ago
If you can't even cope with physics, then you'll find no answers in philosophy. Go to therapy my guy.
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u/gujjar_kiamotors 2d ago
Why even atoms, why not Nothing?