Nihilism: the belief of believing nothing!

You may have heard these lines at some point in your life:

"I tried so hard and got so far

But in the end, it doesn't even matter"

"In The End," written by Linkin Park, a band that speaks about the difficulties we face throughout our lives. Although many people talk about their trials and tribulations, Linkin Park talks about the trials we've all faced and how we tried to get through them, but then we lost faith and now believe there's no reason to try.

The band describes how all human efforts, whether it is persevering through difficult times to achieve a goal or falling to lose it all, are ultimately worthless and provide no satisfaction after death.

"In The End" belongs to the naturalism branch of nihilism. Nihilism is defined as having nothing to live for and believing that life is meaningless.

Now let's get deeper into what nihilism actually is! 

We've all seen how it goes. We are born one day and die on another. Everything that happens in between is known and understood, but nothing about what happened before or will happen after is known.

As a result, determining the significance of our presence here is extremely difficult. How can we know why we are here if we don't know how or where we came from?

Similarly, if we don't know where we're going or what we're going to become, how can we tell if our current actions have any meaning at all? Because of the uncertainty of both our collective pasts and futures. Humanity has been plagued by the question "What is the meaning of life?" since we became sentient.

We've never been able to answer this question objectively as a species, but many of us have found solace in various ideologies to at least alleviate the anxiety it causes.

According to many different religions, a deity created the entire universe and placed us all in it, and whatever we do on Earth will determine when and how we spend eternity afterward.

Some define life as the love we share with our friends, family, and loved ones. Others believe that the mere existence of life makes it worthwhile to live.

Life, on the other hand, has no meaning for nihilists.

All good and bad actions, suffering, and emotions are completely senseless and meaningless. Nihilism is the belief in nothing. In short a mindset saying "क्या फर्क पड़ता है"

Many of us must have experienced nihilistic thoughts at some point in our lives. We experience a strong sense of purposelessness as if our lives have no meaning and we have no intrinsic value.

This usually occurs when we begin to question our old beliefs, but also just before we acquire new ones to hold onto.

It's the stage when you're growing out of your parents' beliefs, learning new things, having new experiences, and forming your worldview.

And all of these thoughts usually begin with one simple question: why?

A three-letter monosyllabic word capable of causing anything that feels like the rock of your foundation to become slippery.

Like quicksand dragging you into the misery of realizing that maybe, just maybe, your entire life wasn't what you thought it was.

Just take a moment to reflect on your core values and ask yourself, 

"Why?"

What makes you think those things?

From where did they come from?

Why do you believe it?

Keep asking until you reach a point where there is no longer an answer when you reach nothing.

All of the world's religions, as well as all of our scientific discoveries, but the question of "why" remains unanswered.

As a result, the nihilist concludes that there is no why. There is no response, simply nothing. "Life is nothing more than a trip from the maternity ward to the crematorium," Alan Watts once said.

The term "nihilism" is derived from the Latin words "nihil," which translates to "nothing," and "ism," which translates to ideology.

It's nothing's ideology, but that doesn't help us understand it completely. People frequently confuse nihilism with pessimism, but the two are very different.

Pessimists predict the worst-case scenario. They have a pessimistic outlook on life and tend to focus on the negatives because they believe that, in the end, evil will always triumph over good. This is what distinguishes them. Pessimists believe it is good in the world, but they do not believe humans are capable of doing it completely.

Nihilists, on the other hand, have no beliefs. They do not believe that the world is evil, nor do they believe that it is good. The world simply exists in the mind of the nihilist, and humans created morality, thereby creating good and evil.

Take, for example, the glass cup metaphor. Optimists believe the glass is half full, while pessimists believe it's half empty.

Nihilists?

They say to throw away the entire cup because it doesn't matter whether it's full or empty. It doesn't matter if it's full, empty, good, or bad; we're all going to die anyway.

Nihilism is frequently compared to other philosophies such as cynicism and apathy. But, once again, they are all very different, and correctly categorizing your thoughts in these baskets may be more difficult than you think.

People, according to cynics, are always motivated by self-interest. They do not believe that anyone can have intrinsically good motives. They have lost faith in humanity and believe we are all completely selfish, only fighting for our benefit. However, the notion that humans are not good implies that, in the cynic's mind, good exists somewhere else, just not in humans.

There is no such thing as good or evil in the mind of a nihilist. They do not see people as evil or good because they do not believe either of those things exists. They are simply characteristics that we have imbued in things.

Nihilism, on the other hand, is the idea that there’s no grand design or purpose. Nothing to believe in, and therefore, no meaning. This brings to mind the paradox of nihilism.

If you believe in nothing, then that nothing becomes something that you believe in. But since you now believe in something, then there is no nihilism, because nihilism is the belief that there is nothing.

Nihilism is quite different from other philosophical ideas because it was first a literary invention before it ever became philosophical. As a result, it’s not as clearly defined as many of the other philosophies that exist. Many different people explained it in different ways, but eventually, these different definitions got categorized, forming many different kinds of nihilism.

There’s political nihilism. Political nihilists believe that for humanity to move forward as a species, all political, social, and religious orders must be destroyed.

Then there’s ethical nihilism. It rejects the idea of absolute ethical or moral values. With this type of nihilism, good or bad is only defined by society and as such, it shouldn’t be followed if we as a species will ever attain absolute individual freedom. We can kind of just do whatever we want.

And then we have existential nihilism; it’s the understanding that life has no value or meaning. It’s the most popular kind of nihilism, and the one we’ve been talking about for most of this blog.

For nihilists, the existence of things like the state, religious bodies, and even communal morality is a breach of our freedom as individuals. If we cannot do absolutely anything that we want to do, then are we truly free? Or have we simply bound ourselves by some kind of invisible mental chain for reasons we cannot explain?

I was scrolling through Reddit and I came across the question - “if you had the chance to save your pet or a stranger, who would you save?” An overwhelming number of people said their pet, pretty obviously.

When one commenter was confronted, they simply asked the question “why do you think a human life is worth more than that of an animal?” And no one had an answer. Of course, people tried to beat around the bush, but the question “why” was never answered, and that right there is the point of the nihilist. If we cannot answer why we bind ourselves by these rules, then why do we choose to do it?

Well, it might be because of the existential horror and the emotional anguish that comes with agreeing to the fact that life is meaningless. Think about it for a minute, if life is truly meaningless and everything we’re doing has no value, then all the feats of science, the wonders of technology, things like space exploration and human rights movements, look at how far we’ve come, and then think about the fact that it all might just be a waste, a blip in time with no consequence whatsoever in the grand scheme of things.

Knowing that all the things we experience, the ups and downs we go through, that in the end, it’s all for nothing. We aren't obligated to understand the chaos of reality, just to laugh at it.

Friedrich Nietzsche was a strange philosopher because he argued both for and against nihilism at the same time. Arguing, he explained that there is no objective structure or order in our world except the one we create for ourselves. He once said, “every belief, every considering something true is necessarily false because there is simply no true world.”

He believed nihilism would expose all of humanity’s “beliefs” and “truths” as nothing but a symptom of defective Western mythology. As he famously said, “God is dead.” He wasn’t talking about the actual deity of the religions, he was talking metaphorically about the power that religious orders held at the time, and how people were starting to chart their paths and find their meaning in life, denying what was the status at the time.

But then in the same breath, Friedrich argued against nihilism saying that in the coming centuries, the advent of nihilism would drive civilization towards a catastrophe, a disaster waiting to implode. A river that has reached its end.

And if you look at the most destructive civilizations in human history, we can see that this is true.

Longstanding cultural traditions, beliefs, religious institutions, and even financial systems are broken down and nothingness starts creeping in.

Think about it, if nothing matters and we are just a random combination of transient atoms, then how can we ever truly say that despicable things such as slavery, apartheid, and nuclear warfare are bad? How can we call Adolf Hitler objectively one of the worst humans to ever live for trying to wipe out an entire culture?

At a fundamental level, most of us understand that all of these things are indeed terrible, but the danger is that because we cannot explain why we feel that way logically, we can never convince another person to follow the same path. And that is exactly what Friedrich feared.

Pause and look around you for a moment, observe everything that’s going on, particularly on social media, and you can see that we as a species might just be heading for another nihilism outbreak.

Think about it, religion no longer holds any say in what is morally acceptable, people are destroying long-standing beliefs and cultural practices, and are instead charting new courses for themselves.

Anything, no matter how despicable you think it is, now has a loyal fan base defending why they have a right to do whatever it is they want to do, and in reality, why not? That’s the question no one can answer.

Humanity will keep shifting the needle forward ever so slightly until one day, none of us will be able to tell the other that they’re wrong, because “why are they wrong?”

William Shakespeare once wrote, “Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player that struts and frets his hour upon the stage and then is heard no more; it is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, but signifying nothing.”

If life is truly meaningless and we have no purpose for being here, our response should be to make the best out of a bad situation. Instead of seeing the glass half full or half empty, we can simply throw it out and drink directly from the faucet until we’re satisfied.

Because at the end of the day, life alone reasons enough for living.