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Comment by irjustin | Hacker News Reader

> Now I feel special and important and also I feel irrelevant and meaningless.

There's an infinite number of ways to end up at this feeling+realization.

Personally, I reached this when I got interested in cosmology (PBS Space Time!!).

I invoke Nihilistic (existential nihilism) ideas. Because it's not hard to end up at the conclusion that everything is meaningless - you create your own meaning.

I recognize lots of problems attempting to apply this at scale, but it works for me personally.

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This seems more like a perspectivism, egoism, or absurdism than nihilism. Ultimately, nihilism is the position that even any meaning you create is likewise inherently meaningless. To create your own meaning, and maintain that it is meaningful, is a refutation of nihilism, not its embrace.

In the strictest sense, yes you're right. But there are so many "flavors" in popular culture.

For me, Nihilism is the input. i.e. everything is meaningless. But the output, i.e. what do you do, is separate.

There is nothing more freeing than embracing nihilism. We're just sentient space dust, after all.

Totally. The concept of heat death made everything feel pointless to me (that was my moment).

Heat death is well over 10^106 years away[0] but for some reason i was like wtf... nothing matters.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heat_death_of_the_universe#Tim...

I find it it incredibly funny to worry about the heat death of the universe. That's so far beyond our scope of comprehension and the limits of the lifetime of the entire human race it does not matter in the slightest. It feels like the most absurd form of existential egotism.

Yeah that's fair enough. I care more about the end of my consciousness and my own dust turning to dust yet again than the heat death of the universe, something that's so far away, and asymptotically won't ever happen. Is it really the end if nothing can "experience" it?

> I care more about the end of my consciousness

Oh yeah, that one is very personal and I continually struggle with it.

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