Move on stoicism! Why We Should All Embrace Nihilism – and Discover What Really Matters in Life | Friedrich Nietzsche

One of the tricks I developed in the late stages of my first pregnancy to prevent inquiries, concerns, recommendations and advice about having a baby was to refer to her impending birth as “the end of the world.”

“I don’t know,” I’d shrug. “We’ll see what things look like after the apocalypse.”

It was an effective strategy. There’s not a lot of advice you can give a woman who’s openly planning to experience motherhood like nuclear fallout. I was skeptical, even cynical, about what the world insisted was vital to my unborn child’s life. I was skeptical partly because a lot of the advice I was receiving was contradictory. But I was also skeptical because I spent most of my twenties reading Nietzsche.

Nietzsche may not be a natural choice for a young mother. But it helps raise certain questions about values ​​and purpose, which are central to matters of care. I found myself connecting with him again, years later, when my children were in elementary school. I wanted to help navigate the tension between the deep responsibilities we have to those we love and are committed to caring for, and the intense desire for freedom, adventure, and new experiences.

Nietzsche and nihilism are not natural places to look for answers to this kind of question. i know that. Nihilism is the famous philosophy that says “nothing matters” – it is associated with anarchism, hedonism, and that vileness in The Big Lebowski. But for Nietzsche, nihilism does not serve as a shortcut to avoid responsibility, or a ticket to self-indulgence. Nihilism functions first as a diagnosis, then a calculation, then an exhortation. What Nietzsche offers is a way of asking What exactly It matters — and what if what matters is completely different from what we were raised to think mattered.

If we allow that to be true—that what actually matters may be different from what we thought mattered—how can we be sure of what really matters? What might allow us to step outside of ourselves and our social conditioning to gain the perspective necessary to establish our sense of value, purpose, and meaning in life – if that is even possible?

Nietzsche is highly condemnatory of anyone who offers “answers,” “consolation,” or “escape.” He is brutal in his indictment of organized religion and scathing of fellow philosophers who claim to have “solved” the mystery of life. It doesn’t conform to belief systems, easy answers, or lazy escapism from reality. The reader who goes to Nietzsche with questions only returns with more questions. Once you embark on this journey, you may find that you are no longer able to believe in any objective truth, purpose, or meaningful existence.

So the next natural question becomes: How can you tolerate this discomfort? How do you sit in this despair without giving up or giving in? Is it possible to pursue happiness, good health, connection, love, and purpose without collapsing into a negative spiral of cynicism, pessimism, and doubt? Can we be skeptical, pessimistic, cynical, even? NihilismAnd we still get up and prepare school lunches, laugh at our children’s stories about their relief teacher, visit our mother in the hospital, and comb her hair?

Because I was particularly interested in the idea of ​​art as a response to nihilistic thinking, I read the works of several artists who were concerned with nihilism, including Samuel Beckett and Albert Camus, who addressed these questions in their lives and literature. But more often than not, I found myself thinking about Dolly Parton, and the story of the night she wrote not just one, but two Hit songs. She says she gained a lot of weight and was on a liquid diet. The liquid protein was disgusting, and you were supposed to drink it three times a day. One night, she was at a hotel that had the “amazing fried oysters” she loved:

The band was there in the restaurant and I could hear them laughing and talking. I was in my room, because I couldn’t go down there and eat. I remember feeling so sorry for myself in this isolated room while they were having a party. I thought, “Well, I can’t eat. I can’t sit here and feel sorry for myself. Why don’t I just write a song?”

Barton is no nihilist, but if nihilism believes that life is a “solitary room,” and if we have come to believe that “we can’t just sit here and feel sorry” for ourselves, then there is something refreshing in her simple, playful refusal to engage in that despair, and to make something new.

Engaging in nihilistic thought experiments does not necessarily mean hovering around feelings of torture and writing poems about the absurdity of life. For me, this means making a daily commitment to having the courage to question what qualifies as meaningful, trying to confront the discomfort of a potentially meaningless existence, and continuing to show up and make things happen, despite the discomfort and despair.

Nihilism is boring if thinking stops at the point where we accept that life has no meaning. I’m interested in the next point. What do we do in the face of despair? What we make, even if there is nothing to make, matters. What we do, even if nothing we do matters.