Nothing Matters

Suffering matters. Because we all are capable of experiencing it. And it should be the basis for systems of morality, and therefore help guide our decisions.

This is a good example of accepting nihilism, and then immediately rejecting nihilism because nihilism doesn't matter. Well done.

Ok, I remember the first time I got high and tripped out on whole nihilistic/insignificance thing.

You can also go the other direction, and think about the mind-boggling complexity of a single cell in your body, and all these cells working together to form, say, a tiny thought in your brain. We're pretty spectacularly significant, if you compare us to small things rather than big things.

Regardless, you'll have to define "meaning" for me before you can convince me that it's all meaningless. I have a definition for it that works for me, and it is relative and dependent on perspective.

    I tell you, we are here on Earth to fart around, and 
    don't let anybody tell you different.
    Kurt Vonnegut

Yup. Gotta keep some perspective.

A very old wonderment indeed.

These are the words of the Quester, David’s son and king in Jerusalem

Smoke, nothing but smoke. [That’s what the Quester says.] There’s nothing to anything—it’s all smoke.

What’s there to show for a lifetime of work, a lifetime of working your fingers to the bone?

One generation goes its way, the next one arrives, but nothing changes—it’s business as usual for old planet earth.

The sun comes up and the sun goes down, then does it again, and again—the same old round.

The wind blows south, the wind blows north. Around and around and around it blows, blowing this way, then that—the whirling, erratic wind.

All the rivers flow into the sea, but the sea never fills up.

The rivers keep flowing to the same old place, and then start all over and do it again.

Everything’s boring, utterly boring— no one can find any meaning in it.

Sounds like someone discovered Nihilism?

Alex, you should crack open some Nietzsche. I recommend Zarathustra of course.

From an interdependent worldview, the question that nihilism poses loses any meaning, because we accept that all things are meaningful in relation to some things, and all things are meaningless in relation to other things. Nothing stands on its own. Nothing is meaningless or meaningful. All things are perceived in relation to others. I believe a great number of people are ready to leave the dualistic worldview that dominates the world today. Interdependent worldviews will inspire many solutions to some of the major problems the world currently faces.

"the Absurd" refers to the conflict between the human tendency to seek inherent value and meaning in life, and the human inability to find any in a purposeless, meaningless or chaotic and irrational universe.

"The stranger" by Albert Camus is available as an audiobook on youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C-Wlj2JkEec

I listen to it in my car!

Related Kurzgesagt video: optimistic nihilism https://youtu.be/MBRqu0YOH14

Life being so small and fragile doesn't make us insignificant, it makes us the most significant thing in the universe. What is happening on this planet matters, because each individual human matters, because your experience and your suffering are real. Your experience is profound on a cosmological scale, because you are the only thing within the universe which can experience it.

Nothing matters; therefore meaning is meaningless. Please feel free to assign meaning as you see fit, and go about your day as normal.

> Nothing we ever do will ever be remembered or matter.

I am not so sure about this. Our data based society pretty much guarantees that a lot of information about what any one of us did will make it into the future as long as the species (and tech level) survives.

Even more so if we get off-planet. But yeah, ultimately that doesn’t really matter to the main point of the article.

He missed the best part: you, your consciousness, what in folklore we would call your soul, is nothing more than a sidecar pilot program for the phenotype your dna has 'chosen' to create. The selfish gene only cares about the self gene.

The problem with being smart is that it make you realize so many things that a non-smart person will never understand.

Many of those things, are likely to make you sad, and some of them might even make you question your own existence

Lets put some P in PhD. I mean, like two thousands years was quite enough to say everything about nihilism.

I think I was 8 when I had these thoughts. They seemed meaningless, so I moved on.

D'oh, first thing I had to think of while reading the article was the definition of edgelord in the Urban Dictionary.

https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=edgelord

You’re welcome to think it’s meaningless, and I’m welcome to disagree.

The other day I was listening to a podcast with Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins, two people that annoy me to no end, but I'm a glutton for punishment. In the podcast they made the point that if a man were to pursue his true biological imperative in modern society, he would just get paid to donate sperm all day at a sperm bank. That was a joke obviously but it speaks to a kind of simple, outcome-oriented way of looking at who we are. But the truth is we did not evolve to procreate, we evolved to have sex. The distinction is subtle, but it's there. We are amazing creatures but our DNA doesn't encode the big picture, it only encodes enough for us to make another link in the chain.

I think it's ok to step back and admire the big picture, but I don't think we are equipped to live in a way where we find agreement with the big picture.

In the world where nothing matters, would be no heroes.

Agreed, so we might as well do something interesting. We inject meaning. Or we don't and suffer. Totally up to us.

Wild.

> I’d just like to take a second to point out how absurd all this is.

This passage from CS Lewis's Mere Christianity seems appropriate:

My argument against God was that the universe seemed so cruel and unjust. But how had I got this idea of just and unjust? A man does not call a line crooked unless he has some idea of a straight line. What was I com­paring this universe with when I called it unjust? If the whole show was bad and senseless from A to Z, so to speak, why did I, who was supposed to be part of the show, find myself in such violent reaction against it? A man feels wet when he falls into water, because man is not a water animal: A fish would not feel wet.

Of course I could have given up my idea of justice by saying it was nothing but a private idea of my own. But if I did that, then my argument against God collapsed too—for the argument depended on saying that the world was really unjust, not simply that it did not happen to please my private fancies. Thus in the very act of trying to prove that God did not exist—in other words, that the whole of reality was senseless—I found I was forced to assume that one part of reality—namely my idea of justice—was full of sense.

Consequently atheism turns out to be too simple. If the whole universe has no meaning, we should never have found out that it has no meaning: Just as, if there were no light in the universe and therefore no creatures with eyes, we should never know it was dark. Dark would be without meaning.

That's right, nothing matters. So you should give me all your money because it's meaningless anyway.