We spend our days bound by endless obligations. Yet, even with loneliness, failed relationships, and soul-draining work, people still manage to catch a glimpse of happiness. Why?
I think life is about maximizing positive subjective experience. If it doesn’t make you happy or allow you to live happy in other moments, don’t do it. Work sucks, but it gives you money that allows you to buy things that make you happy.
Why aren’t you creating meaning?
Without a god, there’s only one option left for anyone with agency - us.
The fuck are you doing whining about it? Time’s wasting and you don’t have much. Get out there and build something that matters.
Well, that’s kinda the point.
If you assume that all we get is what we have while we’re alive, then that life becomes the point
A lot of people that reach the conclusions you have, opt out. They move into a commune, they go vagabond, they may choose to just flit between jobs and find whatever fun is in them.
Or, they may decide to become focused on finding purpose within the world that is, the societal structures as they exist. Some of those devote themselves to service, or find jobs that they believe make life better for others.
Some stay in the framework of things, but do the bare minimum and focus on their off time their purpose.
The point of it, from that point of view where this is all we get, is to find what makes staying alive worth it.
It isn’t like the certainty of no afterlife removes your ability to live and love and do good things. It can make it harder to bear the bad things of life as well, but that’s anything really.
The point is what you decide it is.
Well written!
Couldn’t have said it better myself. Time, and how you use it, becomes more important once you understand that it’s finite.
Does there need to be a point? We eat because we’re hungry, sleep because we’re tired, live because we’re instinctively apposed to death.
There’s nothing after this, so make the most of what you get. Try leave your corner of the world a slightly better place then when you were born.
Something doesn’t have to exist forever to have meaning, that seems like a holdover from utopic afterlife religious indoctrination.
We can enjoy a movie or a lunch knowing it will end, I can pursue meaning and find multiple purposes throughout a lifetime.
There’s no point, and that’s beautiful. Go live your life the way you want to — nothing will happen after you die
Or another way, the process is the point
the worst advice ever given to Ted Bundy
There are two types of thinking about it:
- There is no point in living. We are doomed to get into the grave, and eventually be forgotten forever.
- There is no point in living. No higher order, no higher purpose, no higher authority. We are free to live our lives, to explore, to insert any meaning whatsoever into it. We are forging our own destiny.
And, protip, you’re not going to be around for option 1 anyway.
there is no point. simply try to enjoy it
thanks for the profound insight, nutsack.
Whatever you want. Find something that brings you joy and try to do more of that. If it’s important to you to leave a legacy, try to connect to others and be in their lives. Try to make good, meaningful changes to the world, even if they’re small. Our existences are only so long, and worth enjoying.
IIRC, the nihilist position is that there is no point, and the way I’ve chosen to interpret that is that it means we are free to personally define the point at any time, and for any length of time, as we please. The pointlessness lets us custom design life to fit our needs and desires, if we can minimize getting caught up in “you should do this and be that” external mentalities that may be incompatible with our natures. This seems like one of many correct paths to life satisfaction.
Of course, part of the battle is discovering what’s in your(you in general not you specifically) nature to do and be, and then having the courage to see it through no matter what influences around you are saying or doing that may contradict it. The other part being unlearning incompatible mindsets that may have been fed into your mind when you were younger; authority figures anywhere in, and in any stage of, life are in dangerous positions to cause long term harm to impressionable, trusting minds, which is why I personally focus more on the “figure” and less on the “authority” part of “authority figure” when I’m dealing with people in those positions.
“It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it” - Aristotle or whoever actually said it.
Absurdism > Nihilism
You can either let the fact that nothing matters trap you, or you can allow it to free you.
From what i’ve observed, people deal with “there’s no higher power” differently.
For some people, that i call right-wing, or authoritarian, having some higher power that tells them what to do, is the meaning of life. If they lose that something, then they become depressed and stop living, in any sense, a joyful life.
On the other hand, there are people, which i am comfortable to call left-wing, or hippies, or communitarian, who don’t need that higher power to tell them what to do, in fact, it rather obstructs them. They are joyful even in the absence of a higher, guiding power, because they can find their own meaning in life.
IMO the need for a higher authority is both because of fear of death, and to be lazy and not think about what is right and wrong. So either excuse yourself (ex. catolicism, ask oardon from god not the victim) or just believe “your” religion gives you the right to do as you please.
So stop living in fear and embrace the absurd that we, simple 100 years tops organic blobs live in a billion years universe.
Well, things do happen after you die, just not to you.
Compassion for those who come after us is one possible source of meaning.
One could also consider that having no afterlife makes this life more meaningful than it would be compared to an infinity.
Your body decomposes.
The journey wasn’t taken from you just because there is no destination
Literally a theme in the video game Journey.
Nobody exists on purpose. Nobody belongs anywhere. Everybody’s going to die. Come watch tv.
But you are here now, so live a good life and enjoy it while you can. Maybe try to help others do the same. This is all we get, so use it to the fullest.
