Sunny nihilism: ‘Since discovering I’m worthless my life has felt precious’
Wendy Syfret at The Guardian
How hard is it to find meaning in life? There are countless paths you can take. In business. In the arts. In sports. In relationships. In families. In hobbies. In education. In social and political interactions. Things become meaningful here because from day to day they are attached to the satisfaction and the fulfillment that participating in all these different things can provide.
Instead, what some find hard is in anchoring existential meaning to one or another overarching essential meaning of life. An ontological and teleological font that enables you to tie all the things you do to some all encompassing meaning. Whether anchored to God or to any number of secular Humanisms. And, in failing to accomplish this, some can become quite disturbed.
And, as well, rooted in dasein, some never go searching for this at all. They are either content to feed off the gratification that their day to day commitments provide, or they choose instead to make it all about accumulating experiences that simply bring them pleasure. Hedonists for example.
But here again we can still encounter the objectivists. There may be no inherent meaning, but they still manage to convince themselves that “my meaning” reflects the most rational manner in which to understand the world around us. That they come closest to the least hollow perspective on the human condition.
There are or have been any number if them here. Some religious. Some secular. But they all come here with these often elaborated thought out “theories of everything” which they then try to convince all the rest of us to embrace in turn. So, for all practical purposes, there night just as well be an inherent meaning when they comes across those who won’t or don’t accept their own .