If you aren’t religious, it’s easy to feel like life is somehow inherently meaningless and that humans add their own meaning to it. For some, this is fine – they don’t think too much about it, and move on. For others, like me when I was in college, this can be a source of existential dread and even depression. I suspect the reason people are addicted to their phones is that they fundamentally aren’t comfortable with their existence.
The idea that life is fundamentally meaningless is roughly known as existential nihilism. Before continuing, I should note that I’m not a philosopher, nor am I particularly well-versed in scholarly views on nihilism. This essay is mostly a response to the kind of everyday nihilism I’ve seen in my peers, who might make statements like “Nothing really matters anyway” and feel that this is somehow the philosophically obvious and correct viewpoint.
There are a few reasons people seem drawn to nihilism. One might be that there are a variety of different religions that all have conflicting views – this makes it seem like one’s religious beliefs are largely a matter of chance, and makes it difficult to believe in one particular religion. Then, in the absence of a religion to tell you why life is meaningful, one has to invent one’s own reasons, or simply avoid thinking about it. Once you start trying to reason about the meaning of life from scratch, it’s hard to avoid feeling like whatever decision you make or conclusion you come to is ultimately arbitrary. So it’s natural to conclude that the “truth” is that life is meaningless, and that it’s our ideas about it that give it meaning.
There are a few ways to proceed from here. When I was in college I somehow found comfort in the fact that I didn’t particularly want to die, so I might as well live. Other people say “Well, we’re just humans, so let’s just be humans, enjoy time with friends and family, and do what we can to help each other.” I might call this the “pragmatic” avoidance of nihilism which basically says “why bother thinking about it?” This seems pretty effective for people who can do it – but for others, there’s still a nagging feeling that there’s something they haven’t fully resolved, or like they’re distracting themselves to avoid thinking about the ultimate pointlessness of things. Or it can feel like everything you’re doing is meaningless and unsatisfying in the background, even if it’s something you might enjoy.
For someone in this last camp, how does one proceed? Do you conclude via reason that life is meaningless, but go on living with “impassive stoicism”, as the Wikipedia page for existential nihilism suggests? Or is there another way to think that doesn’t lead to the conclusion that life is meaningless?
Recently, I’ve come to think that the understanding that life is meaningless is based on a subtle logical error. Instead of thinking about “life”, for a second, let’s consider this coffee cup:
Is this cup of coffee meaningful? It’s just the coffee shop’s cup – it’s not particularly meaningful to me. But I do like it, and it signifies ritual and comfort. If this were the last cup of coffee I drank at this coffee shop before it closed, however, maybe it’d have more meaning. Or if it were a mug that my grandpa gave me before he died, it’d be much more significant. So it’s clear at least that the sense of meaning of an object is contextual.
The mistake that I think (at least some) existential nihilists make is to go from “meaning is contextual” to “things are essentially meaningless”.
Let’s again consider this coffee cup:
Is this coffee cup meaningless? For any of you reading this, it almost certainly feels meaningless. You might think, “Why would I care about that cup of coffee?”, or “Stop showing me pictures of a coffee cup.” Or maybe you think “It’s just a bunch of matter, melted sand formed into a drinkable shape, inherently void of all meaning.”
Let’s compare that to my own response to this coffee cup, which is “I like it”.
Aren’t “This cup is meaningless” and “I like this cup” both based on human ideas? Is there anything more fundamentally true about “This cup is meaningless” than “This cup is meaningful”?
It turns out that while meaning is contextual, meaninglessness is also contextual and only exists in contrast to ideas of meaning!
So it’s actually not the case that somehow meaninglessness is the objective state of things, and that humans simply add meaning. If you think humans add meaning, you must also realize that they add meaninglessness!
So where does this leave us with our cup of coffee (or life)? In fact, it’s neither meaningful, nor meaningless. It’s:
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