Living Like Nothing Matters
awealthofcommonsense.com
awealthofcommonsense.com
Here's a thought experiment: if you are able to see a the still mostly full moon tonight, and luckier still if you can actually see some stars, when you look at the moon, consider that you are actually looking down at it. You, as a person are hanging over it sort of perpendicularly to the surface of this sphere. Keep your eyes on it long enough that you see it move just so imperceptibly slowly, until you feel a bit dizzy or get a bit of vertigo from the motion. From this vantage point of hanging off the side of a sphere, it's like seeing the moon for the first time, and once you have seen the movement you will recognize in that moment that you are _on_ a planet, which is suddenly finite with an obvious curvature, and the most immediate question is, what the hell is this thing and how is it possible we can distract ourselves from contemplating it?
It is the literal definition of physical perspective, where when you view the moon as downward from you, it makes everything here seem both finite and possible. The stars when you look down or out at them become asymptotic points on a blanket-like manifold. The mistake was that we think these things were merely "up," and things "down" here are the sum of the real. I think when you see how we are situated relative to the moon, other planets, and stars without the narrative filter of a self that looks inward, it's not that nothing matters, it's that anything that obfuscates this sense of clarity you can get about our place in the cosmos just from looking down the hollow space between us and the moon - is necessarily absurd.
Why should the esteem of people you do admire matter? I’m genuinely curious why you added that qualification.
Why build anything when in 20 years computers will do it better? All that software you wrote, why even do it? All those stories and art can now be remixed. The hive mind will have the answer to every question better than the people who bicker about stuff they don't even know about. Who cares about their opinion? In a couple decades, who needs them to even work? To tell jokes? To have sex? Do we need to pay the next generation all a UBI to make sure they get their needs met?
We may as well build a virtual reality for ourselves to experience whatever we want since it all doesn't really matter, right?
Nihilism is much like a hidden tarpit on the philosophical journey. Easy to fall into and get stuck. Necessary in a way, but not the place to dwell. A primary thing to point out is perception of meaning is flexible and not static, and things don't need "to matter". Meaning is an emergent phenomenon of relationships.
As an example: Doing meaningful computer work is about the relationship between the coder, the computer, and the emotional/physical rewards of completing the work. If you define the relationship of "computer work now" vs "computer work in 20 years" that edge in our meaning graph is going to have a value bending towards not mattering at all.
> what's the point of humans having a replacement rate when a smaller population can be a lot richer and better off?
Sidebar: this is also probably wrong as far as I understand. Modern wealth is built off of leveraging large populations / economics of scale and has this implied requirement of growth to maintain stability. Until things are completely automated (AKA we have robots capable of matching a human's productivity) a smaller population would imply a population collapse which would not be good in the short term.
It's arguable whether a smaller population can be a lot richer and better off. More people = More specialization and more minds solving problems = faster advancement = better living for everyone.
Yes I get you can make your own progression that goes negative. The point is not that more people = better. It's that less people = better is not a fact, it's an opinion or conjecture
I’m not a philosopher so I’m probably not explaining myself well, but I don’t think anything at all matters in an existential sense. Whether I live or get hit by a bus and die tomorrow or whatever, it’s not important. However, I do think there are many things that are worthy. Helping other people, trying not to harm anything, being kind etc., I believe these things are all very worthy of doing, but I don’t think they matter.
I wish I knew what the philosophical terms for what I’m describing as “matter” and “have worth” were
In reality, it doesn't matter what you are doing if it can survive for a long time then it will eventually have a relatively high impact on humanity. Think of the things we see in museums: shaped rocks, ceramics, rudimentary art, bones. Anything that has survived for hundreds, thousands, millions of years is worth very much to us as humans because we are junk collectors.
In that regard, what's more durable than our genes being passed on? Reproduction is one of the easiest way to ensure some bits of your information are conserved. But in reality, anything you do has some kind of impact in the world; though I would say it's impossible to quantify and it's impossible to tell if what we do has a positive or negative impact.
With this in mind, why would anything matter? In reality, first we need to ask ourselves if we think our own present experience is valuable. Not everyone will agree. But if you think that you existing right now is desirable then you may agree that others existing right now is also valuable, from here, it's easy to think that others existing in the future is valuable. This, coupled with, the work of others in the past has been valuable to me in the present will give you that the work of people in the present will be valuable to other's existence in the future. And because it's not possible to really quantify whose work is how valuable at which point in time it's easy to say "my work, regardless of what it is, may become valuable to someone's existence in the future".
But as I said, if you think of things from this perspective, you might want to try and do things that will live through as many years as possible in order to maximise the chance of them directly influencing people's lives in the future. I think the digital age might prove very useful, if we build these repositories and we manage to keep them alive for as long as humanity exists. I mean, right now people's work are being used to train all kinds of artificial intelligence that do all sorts of cool stuff. They're data points, each almost as useful as the next one.
So yeah, the real pain point of nihilism is actually thinking the present matters; rather than the future. We can't tell what's going to happen in the future, but we know the past is valuable for the present and so it's very easy to concede that the present may be valuable for the future.
If nothing really matters, then you are free to choose what you care about.
Really solidifies the motion you otherwise don't notice.
That's nothing. We routinely ignore amazing things. It is required for us to go about our lives.
What I would like is to be able to summon the amazement at will without it losing its sharpness over repeated contemplation.
(I wonder if there is also Flanderization going on, like discussed here yesterday.)
You'll get the flat moon theorists all riled up with that sort of talk...
On Leaving for New Zealand
Once on a morning in deep winter I spied the moon almost full but not quite Over the roof of the house where I was delivering the morning newspaper.
Between splayed branches Earthshine making its roundness plain To show that it was a rock suspended Like the earth around, solid but floating too.
In those days there was no son Or daughter, or wife or plan. I could not guess what things would be Or where my route would take me.
Yet now if I stood on the moon’s dark plain And looked down from there, I might see My son standing on the far southern sphere Looking back up at me.
Yup!
One of the best sayings I heard on the topic of doing anything potentially viewed as odd:
"Those who mind, don't matter, and those who matter don't mind"
As I recall, the curators argue these technologies diminished our capacity for awe in the numinal when they depict the cosmos as it really exists.
Cosmos: From Romanticism to the Avant-garde. Jean Clair, Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona · 1999
I’ve also heard the counter theory from a film professor of mine in college, Charles Chess. He argued film has the power to manifest strong emotional reactions which our mind/consciousness suppresses.
Offered as proof of his belief, he related the story of a film class field trip to a slaughter house, followed by the class screening the film “Blood of the Beasts” (Original title: Le sang des bêtes. 1949. 22 minutes). Only the film caused students to feel sick, or so he says.
Out of the estimated 117 billion[1] humans who have walked the Earth, how many who have died can we actually name off the top of our heads? A few hundred at best? Maybe a few thousand if you're a history buff? And of that group, how many will still be remembered at the heat death of the universe? I'd bet money that the answer is "none of them".
So what's the point of trying to be remembered or leave a legacy? It's a game that we're destined to lose, so why play? Personally, I don't care how big my gravestone is, or whether I have my name on the side of a building, or whether I have an element in the periodic table named after me. Because it'll all come crumbling down in the end. This too shall pass.
And rather than being depressing, it's actually liberating. It means I'm done climbing the corporate ladder. It means I can work just hard enough to pay the bills at my day job, while leaving ample free time to engage with creative pursuits that satisfy me. It means I can have kids if it makes me happy, but I don't feel pressured to out of a sense of "continuing the family line" or some other bullshit.
No matter how hard I try, literally nothing you or I do will be remembered on a long enough timespan. Hell, I don't even know the names of my great-grandparents, and chances are that, if I ever have kids, my great-grandkids won't remember mine. It's like Carl Sagan's "Pale Blue Dot" quote[2]. I don't know what the meaning of life is, but I'm pretty sure it's not "try to wrest some sort of immortality by being remembered after you're gone".
1. https://www.prb.org/articles/how-many-people-have-ever-lived....
Projected or perceived legacy after passing is correlated with level of consumption while alive.
Always has and always will be. Roman Emperors, Kings etc. they got to be on coins and have monuments erected after them after their death, AND at the same time they were the person with the most conspicous consumption in the whole country while still alive.
Case in point: Queen Elizabeth II.
I hope you have better luck with it than I did. But I doubt my luck would change if I simply tried consuming even harder.
In countries where there is a fast turnover such as sub-saharn Africa, people don't have such problems. They get out in the morning trying to get more and they die way before they hit the wall of diminishing returns and for sure way before start wondering about the wider scope.
With regards to wondering too much about the wider scope it becomes perfectly clear that having a high IQ isn't always an advantage. You want to be the luckiest dumbass to achieve both maximum consumption and the ability to never ever start pondering concepts such as the wider scope or any of the unsolvable phylosphical questions
It's like Bud Fox said in the movie "Wall Street"- "How many yachts can you water-ski behind?"
Not so fast there buddy.
The reason for climbing corporate ladders is to enrich your own life and give you more wealth, which can make your life far more comfortable and gain you respect and recognition amongst peers when it is most valuable: while you are alive.
Even if you could be remembered all throughout time and even past the heat death of the universe, it would be pointless because you are dead and cannot experience this fame. You wouldn’t care either way, that’s what makes death so final.
If you are not careful, you could just end up as a wage slave contributing to the rise of someone else’s awesome life. And then you can experience the pain of being forgotten when it hurts the most: while you are still alive. You won’t have to wait till the heat death of the universe to finally be forgotten, people can just stop giving a shit about you right now. Keep climbing.
In fact, you're probably climbing away from the people who already recognize and respect you best already.
"Peers", maybe but that just means "other people who value climbing corporate ladders" - who tend to be quite superficial people.
But that's the thing- I don't actually need any of those things. My upper-middle class life is already comfortable. My peers already respect me. Sure, there could always be more money and respect, but that would always be the case, no matter how high I climb. There will always be someone with more money and respect than I have. There is no "Final Boss". Even Elon Musk (currently the world's richest person) probably compares himself with historical figures whose wealth would put his to shame (Alexander The Great, Mansa Musa, Marcus Licinius Crassus, etc.).
It's like the old (and probably apocryphal) story of the conversation between Joseph Heller and Kurt Vonnegut [1]. I have something the ladder climbers will never have- enough. I can either continue deferring happiness until I reach the next rung of the ladder (and there's always another rung), or I can decline to climb at all and choose happiness today, right now.
1. https://alearningaday.blog/2019/06/04/joseph-heller-and-enou...
That’s pretty typical. One says that money or status doesn’t matter. Then you prod them and it specifically doesn’t matter to get more of it—to the person that already has more of it than most people.
Yesterday I drove out into the Arizona desert and gazed upon the stars. I didn’t think about my non-mortgage debt (because I have none); I didn’t worry about my interpersonal relationships at my job (because I have so much seniority now that I don’t have to worry about my boss being a complete asshole); I didn’t worry about what people might think of me (because I have a large social network and in fact I am meeting some friends for dinner right after this stargazing session); I didn’t worry about comparing myself to my peers (because they already respect me and my accomplishments/family/prestige). Then I stayed there for a good fifteen minutes, gazing at the stars, thinking about the vastness of the cosmos and conflated me having satisfied all my material needs, my close relationship needs, and my peer-respect needs with having gotten insight into the meaning of life.
In that moment I was enlightened.
>Not so fast there buddy.
... I feel the urge to tell you the same.
>The reason for climbing corporate ladders is to enrich your own life and give you more wealth, which can make your life far more comfortable and gain you respect and recognition amongst peers when it is most valuable: while you are alive.
It sounds like "respect and recognition amongst peers" is more important to you (which is fine btw, no judgement) than it is to OP, but most of your post seems to suggest that that's where OP should be placing their importance. In point of fact, it sounds like they have already determined what is important to them, have worked to achieve it and are happy with where they're at.
>If you are not careful, you could just end up as a wage slave contributing to the rise of someone else’s awesome life.
... so? I don't mean to speak for OP with the comment I'm about to make, but for me, I don't care. As long as I can pay my bills, and then have enough money for my creative and extracurricular endeavors, then I'm perfectly happy. I don't care if that means that my position somewhere on the career ladder means that someone else is having a more "awesome" life than me somewhere else, because they're truly not. Their life is theirs, mine is mine, and I'm happy with mine. Hell, I'd even call mine "awesome".
>And then you can experience the pain of being forgotten when it hurts the most: while you are still alive. You won’t have to wait till the heat death of the universe to finally be forgotten, people can just stop giving a shit about you right now. Keep climbing.
But see for me (and maybe OP? who knows?), I don't care about being recognized by my professional peers. I care about my family, my friends, and the people involved in my creative (non-work) pursuits. And those are people who I know will never give a shit where I've climbed on a corporate ladder.
I'd also argue that @xwdv's comment implies that I'm destined to be a wage slave whether I climb the ladder or not.
Are you claiming that's what I said? Because I'm searching my posts for the phrase "money doesn't matter" and am coming up empty.
- Your salary
- Your fancy title
- How ‘busy’ you were
- How stressed you were
- How many hours you worked
People will remember:
- The giant monoliths you have erected to your own majesty
- Poems about the monoliths, or at least a few of the good lines
-Tim Carmody (tweet)
I wonder where would we as a species be if Newton or Einstein or Steve Jobs and a million others who contributed their little might to advancing our species forward thought the same?
No, that's the opposite of what I'm saying.
> I wonder where would we as a species be if Newton or Einstein or Steve Jobs and a million others who contributed their little might to advancing our species forward thought the same?
Is my life better because those people did what they did? Absolutely. Would I be sad if they hadn't existed, or had lived a less noteworthy life? Probably not, because I wouldn't know any better.
If you Google "Who was the smartest person in history?", you'll probably encounter the name William James Sidis, who reportedly had taught himself multiple languages (and invented another) by the age of 8. In 1925 he wrote a book called "The Animate and the Inanimate", which (among other things) predicted the existence of black holes almost 15 years before Einstein did. And yet, we'll never know what ground-breaking work he could have done or advancements he could have made.
Because he chose to live a life of solitude, and died of a brain hemorrhage at the age of 46.
Imagine for a minute that I could travel to an alternate universe, one where Sidis became the next Newton and made incredible discoveries that advanced the course of human knowledge and contributed to countless new discoveries to which I bore witness. I might be more depressed as a result, if I saw how much better off humanity's lot was. But imagine if I saw that we'd be worse off. Maybe Sidis would have discovered scientific principles which would have been usurped by Hitler or the like to build weapons that made the atom bomb looks like a child's toy, and which humanity used to destroy itself. If that's what I saw in this alternate universe, I'd be happier since I'd know that we had avoided that fate. Odds are, his contributions would have been a bit of a mixed bag.
But it doesn't matter, because I can't mourn what I can't see.
The answer to "where will we as a species be?" is (eventually) "consigned to the dustbin of history". We can make every effort to be the next Newton or Einstein or Steve Jobs. And if we make someone else's life more comfortable or interesting or fun or whatever in the meantime, I'd argue that's a worthy pursuit.
But re-read that Carl Sagan quote I linked to earlier [1], and think about how insignificant their contributions were in the grand scheme of things. I hope they enjoyed themselves while they were alive. Because now that they're gone, the clock is ticking on their legacy. Think of the most famous person you can (Jesus, Gandhi, etc.), and know that there will come a day when someone will utter that person's name for the last time.
You don't owe the future of humanity anything. Nor did Newton, Einstein, or Jobs. That hypothetical future humanity doesn't even exist yet, and given our trajectory as a species, it's almost hubris to assume that they will.
https://archive.org/details/TheAnimateAndTheInanimate.W.J.Si...
Finally, within the frame of our social existence: we enjoy a lot of benefits that we inherit from our ancestors and I think it’s our responsibility to pay that forward to future generations. We should maintain what we have inherited and if possible improve the state of things as well. But, of course, we should also be concerned with our personal enjoyment as well.
I would disagree with that as well. I'd simply argue that the reason why we shouldn't feel free to hurt others is because we likely wouldn't want others to hurt us, and their feelings are just as valid as ours.
"Don't ask yourself what the world needs. Ask yourself what makes you come alive, and go do that, because what the world needs is people who have come alive." -Howard Thurman
If people "come alive" by helping society, then that's great. But "helping society" can be defined in many ways, big and small. If someone's definition of "helping society" is being a street busker and lifting someone's spirit with their music, who am I to judge?
But one of the talks given at that Episcopalian conference claimed, much to my shock, that we needed more little kids running around during the church service, not less... even raising the idea that maybe children's ministry breakaways were not correct. What unimaginable chaos did they intend for my solemn-leaning Catholic-raised soul? Never! But then the talk quoted a different work by Stanley Hauerwas,
> The Christian community’s openness to new life and our conviction of the sovereignty of God over that life are but two sides of the same conviction. Christians believe that we have the time in this existence to care for new life, especially as such life is dependent and vulnerable, because it is not our task to rule this world or to “make our mark on history.” We can thus take the time to live in history as God’s people who have nothing more important to do than to have and care for children.
[emphasis mine.]
So there I was running around, trying to make my mark on history, it was not going especially well heh... Really marked a big shift in my attitudes.
I think this statement is very problematic, especially if you want to be inclusive to the childless or celibate. In the end, it's not an applicable answer for everyone. It's only an answer for those who have already subscribed at some level to that belief, thus I find it unsatisfactory.
This has to be one of the best descriptions for religion that I ever read.
Very many feel a call for making a family, the said idea blesses them encouraging them to follow that call without reticence. And the formula in no way seems limited to making a family: "live in history" has the highest degree of freedom, in one direction.
How can you read that «as constraint and limitation»? You cannot read a banana into a pigeon if not for performance art. What has «think[ing] for themselves» to do with the said concept?! It is fully inconsequential. According to which mysterious theorem should "consider yourself free to be active in the world" have any relation to cognitive dependence?!
Note that some other traditions of gatherings do have children running around during the service... It is like being a point inside an area of brownian motion. Yes, it does not facilitate - but it more mirrors the reality of being in the world, "«unimaginable chaos»" and nonetheless ("nobody told you you will practice in natural lab conditions"). The children would make a smoothed progress from natural encounter to discipline (of course meaning self-discipline).
Note also that the suggestion was about chaos in the «service», not in the monastery.
So, kids in the main service for the first half, and to "kids church" for the second half.
Plenty has been written about this, dating back centuries. The best distillation of it I found is in "Losing Ourselves" by Jay Garfield[0]
Both of these realizations have impressed upon me the importance of living in the moment. Of being there for others who are in need. Of trying to make the experience we all share here a bit better. Because that's all we have - the here and now.
[0]https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/59576734-losing-ourselve...
Are we supposed to believe that there is no separation between us and a bunch of rocks nearby?
Personally, it seems to me that our concepts of morality and existence are just a bunch of wordplay, and the reason some question sounds "mystical" is because we omit a clause. For example, rather than saying "A should B" you should say "If A wants C to happen, then A should B". And that can be much more easily defined. Otherwise, "objective morality" makes as much sense as "objective sense of humor". Can a joke be "objectively funny" if almost no one laughs at it?
I'm not sure how the above follows from the illusion of 'self'. Despite the self being an illusion, we're still persons, and thus distinct from rocks, and everything else, including other persons.
The illusion is that there's a subject at the center of experience. I.e., we don't sense that we're identical to experience, we feel that we're having an experience. That there's some locus of control, independent of the rest of our body, including our brain, that's steering the ship. That's the illusion.
No, but our consciousness is an illusion. What separates us from other animals is how hyper-developed our prefrontal cortex is, and the sense of "future" and cause-and-effect.
I like to think that consciousness is just a side-effect of this advanced survival system. A bug, if you will. Consciousness is just a weird artefact of a biological system that has gone self-aware.
Here's a philosophical nerd snipe: we're aware of our physical limitations (i.e. our eyes can only see a limited range of wavelengths, we have a blind spot, etc.). What are the limitations of our consciousness? Our self-awareness blind spots?
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Narmer_Palette
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Istanbul_2461
[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complaint_tablet_to_Ea-nasir
I wish I could be around in 10,000 years when future historians are puzzling over a digital document that they think is of extreme historical significance, but is actually some angry Karen's 1-star Yelp review for a Cheesecake Factory in Little Rock, Arkansas.
Many people's lives are pretty nice now, especially compared to say 150+ years ago where people had little time for leisure because they had to farm all day or clean clothing all day and cook.
I can certainly imagine we'll get the post scarcity world where even more people will have all their basic needs met. I'd like to be small part of helping to get us there whether or not anyone remembers me. And, I'd go even further, it's better than a life of "not giving a fuck because nothing matters".
"not giving a fuck because nothing matters" to me means you can murder people because nothing matters. It's all just space dust so who cares if you rearrange that pile of space dust from a thinking feeling person into a pile a goo. I don't buy into that.
I don't think that's true. I've lived like nothing matters for most of my adult life, yet I have no desire nor stomach to hurt people on purpose.
It's like that misbelief religious people have about atheism: if there's no God, there's no ethics. That's completely wrong. Believing that nothing matters doesn't turn me into a psychopath.
To be able to afford this after your death, you'd have to be rich and famous (or highly connected to the clergy, I guess). The cathedral has been there for a few hundred years, and there are a few hundred names, so roughly speaking about 25 people in each generation got their names up there. From a population of somewhere between 250K-500K (at a rough guess - there's ~500 churches in the diocese), so 1 in 10,000 people at best, maybe.
I had no idea who any of them were. Still don't. The tiny fraction of wildly successful people who could afford to have their names immortalised in marble are still forgotten.
I will be forgotten. Nothing matters.
as far as we have discovered, any one of us is among the most beautiful, remarkable, complex things we know of, and on top of that we have emotions!
what's the sun? fusing hydrogen. What's Jupiter but a big hurricane? what's a black hole? these things are large, but they're lacking in subtlety, variety, and complexity compared to us. What's in between them? nothing, vast nothing. It's the rest of the universe that so far appears to be insignificant to me.
- Peter Cook
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TazTAqBQakQ
Johnny told him "Just be yourself. That's the only way it CAN work."
Conan spends the entire bit unpacking that advice.
That being said I think it is also important to recognize that for the smaller subset of people you do genuinely care about you should also very much care what they think of you. There are exceptions to this, of course. If you find someone excessively judging you from this group then it might be time to rethink what you are doing or if you should be invested this much in them in the first place.
time is short, tomorrow not guaranteed. this is not freeing as much as it is restricting.
if i could live for a 1000 years, sure then i can live like nothing matters. a bunch of starry eyed nonsense imo.
"Living like nothing matters" can mean a lot of things.
On the positive side, it could mean overcoming an instinct of fear that prevents you from pursuing your true desires.
That might sound "starry-eyed" to people who are used to taking their wishes seriously and investing in realizing them.
Many people are caught in a negative feedback loop that prevents them from standing up for themselves and taking on hardship, instead wasting their energy on a maze of fear management and "less-bad" life choices.
Living "like nothing matters" represents an actually rational approach compared to this type of living, assuming you are made for it.
But "living like nothing matters" could also mean to go all-in on the hedonic treadmill of pain avoidance and insincerity, not considering future costs (see obesity, addiction etc).
The only things one should concern themselves with are things they have the agency to change. This can be frighteningly hard to tease out sometimes, but literally all other worries are wasted cycles of a short life.
Live like the future matters and do your best to improve it. It’s the hardest game with the simplest of rules.
> (1) You can become depressed and lose faith.
> (2) You can become more self-aware and stop caring so much.
1. is our ego speaking, 2. is curiosity speaking.
Universe take me for a ride, show me as many things I can, I'm plenty content as an observer.
Everything, every action, every step one takes has some form of an impact on something. The question is merely whether or not as individuals we care about it. Significance is in the eye of the beholder, and measurable on a scale that you determine.
Am I insignificant compared to anything in space - absolutely. But what if my generations learn the lessons I deem important for them to learn? I might argue my impact is massive, it's now generational. Remember my name or not - but instilling and living ideals.. sounds like a large impact to me. That may not work for others. YMMV.
I am tired of this advice. People who are successful get all the right people to care about them. This does matter.
I don't subscribe to most existing models, not out of a rebellious choice but because I cannot find or follow their logic to a satisfactory conclusion.
So far this is what I have, make of it what you will:
• There must be a default state, and a part of it must reside in everything built upon it. It doesn't make sense that something began from Nothing, but I like to think that something began from Everything.
• But it doesn't mean that a superset system can control a subset system 100% – Think of our relationship with computers and the programs running on/in them, along with all the physics involved and the virtual results.
• Veritasium's video on "Math's Fundamental Flaw" [0] was a good source of inspiration: Shit may be coded with hard immutable logic but still have virtually infinite possibilities.
• If you think your mind, or your "will" or "heart" or "soul", matters in any way and can make any difference, try to find the cutoff point between -where- that metaphysical quality starts, what sets "you" apart from everything else: What's the difference between you and every other person's mind/soul? Or a person's mind and a computer program? The difference between a world with no humans in it, and a world with 1 human? A barren asteroid and a planet with life? Can a rock access the mysteries of the Universe? Can you?
TL;DR: What you see right now may be what you will ever get, everything may just be circumstance, but there -just might- be a way to touch something greater.
A foolhardy view that conveniently removes the denomination that are dead.
Mine is “hope for the best, prepare for the worst.”
You’ll get yourself in all sorts of entanglements by subscribing to these sorts of belief systems
In reality, nothing matters existentially yet everything matters in the moment. Your ability to accept both of these realities at the same time is freedom
Is this supposed to be some enlightening statement? Even if you hold your breath until you die, still, nothing matters. You will die, and that will be the end of it. Some people who love you will be disheartened for some time, maybe til the end of their own life, but that too shall pass.
Your response, any many others here, seem to take "nothing matters" as "life is bad, so you should just die and be done with it". Which is a weird redefinition if you think about it. The real redefinition should be "life doesn't matter, so it doesn't matter if you happen to die". Which is not the same as choosing to take action to kill yourself, or even choosing to deal with pain.
If we turn to the argument you outlined and that other posters mentioned in this thread, it does raise some important (no pun intended) questions for nihilists. If a nihilist avoids the pain response and assigns no value to existence or its component parts, then why not make use of a painless suicide method? I don't recall the exact details, but you can assemble a nitrogen DYI kit in barely a few Amazon packages that just puts you to sleep peacefully. In effect, it's Benatar's asymmetry argument but remixed to apply to living beings. The nihilist is not losing anything of value when they lose their life, but they can avoid all the as of yet undefined physiological and psychological pain that they know is guaranteed for their future if they continue to live.
The nihilist will take logical steps to avoid many sensations that they don't enjoy as part of a life that has no value, or there is something about that life that they value enough to prevent themselves from taking this course of action. Either way, the idea that a human being can genuinely believe that nothing matters is in trouble because suicide methods are so painless and convenient today. If we point out that human psychology and physiology prevent us from willing the act of suicide no matter how painless, we are back to the original argument as well. In the end, a human can consider nihilism while being unable to perceive it truly, just like we can consider what extra colors a bird can see without being able to truly see them.
Riffing in what you said, I rather say “you can simultaneously believe the universe is indifferent while also believing things matter to individual beings.”
Of course, the paradox is if your suffering doesn’t matter, why bother avoiding suffering? Yet, if nothing matters, why not avoid suffering?
Which is why I don't like the Buddhist idea of getting rid of all materialistic attachments.
If you get rid of materialistic attachments you also get rid of meaning. And while it's true, things don't mean anything in an abstract universal sense....
Human beings live in a human world not in some void in space and meaning is important to us and can give us great happiness and joy.
Obviously life means something to all of us because we're still breathing every single day and most of us wish to continue to do so.
After enlightenment, chop wood and carry water.
Buddhism (as I imperfectly understand it) is not about getting rid of materialistic attachments. It’s realizing materialistic attachments are the source of suffering.
The world remains. What you do within it is up to you.
Materialistic attachments are the only things in which you find meaning? Damn.
Many parents feel strongly that their childrens' wellbeing is deeply significant.
I was just telling an anecdote of when my first child was born and I took parental leave. I was shunned by some colleagues, and even my own father, for what was considered a career-limiting move. Looking back now nearly six years later, I couldn't tell you what we shipped in those weeks before or after my leave. I can barely even recall what broad initiative I was working on. But I do remember the days and nights with my wife, getting to know my child, and think about it often. Had I taken the advice of so many around me, I would have missed a once in a lifetime opportunity that I will remember and cherish for the rest of my life. Nobody will remember that about me, and the memory will be gone when I die, but it matters to me.
You’re better off reading Camus.
This article is more stoicism than nihilism.
That being said, I would agree that this post perhaps not quite achieve the philosophical thought of Albert Camus :)