The world is meaningless, there is no God or gods, there are no morals, the universe is not moving towards any higher purpose.
All meaning is man-made, so make your own, and make it well. Do not treat life as a way to pass the time until you die.
Do not try to "find yourself", you must make yourself.
Choose what you want to find meaningful and then live, create, love, hate, cry, destroy, fight and die for it.
Do not let your life and your values and you actions slip easily into any mold, other than that which you create for yourself, and say with conviction, "This is who I make myself".
Do not give in to hope. Remember that nothing you do has any significance beyond that with which you imbue it. Whatever you do, do it for its own sake. When the universe looks on with indifference, laugh, and shout back, "Fuck You!". Remember, that to fight meaninglessness is futile but fight anyway, despite its futility.
The world may be empty of meaning, but it is a blank canvas on which to paint meanings of your own.
Really? What a mishmash of meaningless platitudes. There's regularly more insightful stuff on the Dr. Phil show.
This insistence on bald self-determination will fail utterly for all but the loneliest, most isolated instances of Nietzschean uebermenschen. The reality is that mankind is a social creature, that we draw on the meaning provided by others, that we look to the molds of others for inspiration, that our definitions of ourselves vary significantly from culture to culture and society or society. But wherever and whoever you are, you won't find the secret to eudaimonia in a philosophical ramble that reads like it was written by the memetic Courage Wolf.
I know many who have tried to "make themselves" and failed. It seems to be a common thing for kids in their early 20s, fresh out of college, to try to do. Many with depression will not be able to summon the will to "imbue" their own meaning. For many, the assertion that the "universe looks on with indifference" is strictly worse than irrelevant. And so on.
And even if you have some unusual strength of willpower such that you can take the OP's advice to heart, trying to re-make yourself all at once, with no idea how to go about it, will be about as productive as banging your head against a wall, and the end result will be nothing but a terrible headache and severe ego depletion.
Indeed, I once tried the Courage Wolf approach to happiness that is advocated above. I found much better results once I decided that I don't know what I want, but by pursuing those things that seem to fulfill me, I can head down the positive path one step at a time.
Many, particularly Greeks such as Aristotle, pondered what makes one happy, free, and virtuous, with much more insight than the OP. But you don't have to read Aristotle. Just use some common sense.
The reality is that [..] that we draw on the meaning provided by others
The reality is that that is the prime cause of suffering. People are unhappy because they cannot possibly live up to all the different expectations different people have of them.
For many, the assertion that the "universe looks on with indifference" is
strictly worse than irrelevant.
Which is sad, because that truth can result in the most complete sense of freedom one can possibly get. Contemplating how 'Nothing matters' sends shivers down my spine.
trying to re-make yourself all at once
There is no need to do it all at once. There is no need to invent everything from scratch. A true nihilist won't stay alive for long, so that's not the goal. We can choose not to be a slave of society, culture and morals. That doesn't mean we can't also choose to accept parts of them, and live in full acceptance of their positive and negative aspects. The point of remaking yourself is choosing how you wish to live your life, instead of mindlessly doing what others expect.
The philosophy kashif describes can be considered to be Buddhist, Existentialist, Nihilist and probably many other things, in nature. Your interpretation and rejection of it as Nietzschean nihilism says more about how you view these things than about what kashif's quote means.
I think "know thyself" is far more valuable than "make thyself", because in real life, everyday terms we have far less control over what makes us happy than it seems, rationally.
But -- we also have far more freedom than many people realize. "I can't" usually conceals a confused morass that needs to be dredged out with a vengeance.
The decision might still be "I won't", but if you know why, and have some sense of how to maintain your emotional equilibrium, etc. you're still far, far ahead in the game.
I think the quote resonates with you (and many people!) because it's so easy to be locked into near-immobility by a kind of inarticulated wash of bad feelings about how other people must be judging us, and in fact most of this anxiety is unfounded and misleading.
It's incredibly valuable to take a kind of eyes-open "5 questions" approach to big decisions, to dig out the kind of thing like "so apparently I will do almost anything to avoid being criticized by men who resemble my father". And yeah, break free from the crowds (hint: this tends to actually earn you respect, not harsh judgment), work on improving yourself, etc..
But don't delude yourself into thinking that simply because there's no god, universal meaning, etc., you'll be able to just shake it off if you realize that your choices have earned you the contempt of those you love and respect.
I'm sure. In fact, I felt obligated to respond because of the unusually powerful rhetoric of that quote. As I hinted, I spent a while hampered by similar ways of thinking--whereas they are appealing, I now consider them very dangerous.
I'm afraid I'm with him. There's too much anger in this, I see that as a waste of energy. None of us is really free, I can't wake up tomorrow and decide to be an NBA player or the president. We have certain options for today, this week, this month, this year... Pick the best path forward, review it occasionally and pour all that energy into doing.
Well said. I found a similar passage on Reddit the other day.
No. Every single fucking day I wake up like a goddam bull, ready to charge out and destroy everything in my path. Maybe I'll start a new business, maybe I'll buy a house, maybe I'll get in my car and drive to Texas, I don't fucking know, but I'm going to do something that makes me happy. Sure, I used to be sad and pathetic like you, not sure what I wanted to do with my life, until I realized, there is no "single thing". I want everything. I want thick juicy steaks still dripping blood, I want wide-open blue skies, endless summer, ice cold glacier water out of the skull of my enemy. I want to fuck until I scream, drive up the face of a cliff, ride horses in France, blow 10 grand on peanut butter or maybe just buy the biggest suite in the place and sit around ordering pay-per-view. It's your goddam life you spineless fuck, no one is going to live it for you. You better wake the fuck up now, or you're going to turn around, look at your Chrysler Minivan, your mortgage, your pot-belly and your thinning hair and wonder with crushing regret where it all went, how you got here, and what the fuck do you do now? Goddam, I want to slap you and wake you the fuck up. You want to know what to do? LEAVE THE FUCKING HOUSE and go explore. Fuck a midget. Create a stand-up routine and do open mike night. Yeah, you aren't funny. Get over it. Learn something new. Go out and live.
Then again, there is something to be said for a nice nap.
That's some attitude, and yet I looked at the profile of the user in question and for a man who could be doing anything he sure does seem to spend a lot of time commenting on reddit.
Yes I know, glass houses and all, but I'm not the one making the braggadocious comment. My real point is not to point and laugh at this guy, but to point out that such things are easily said and not so easily done.
So, this is mostly tongue-in-cheek. But let's look at it seriously for a second anyway.
What makes him happy? Not all of these things he's writing about, of course. Though I'll bet he's happy when he writes about it, and gets the impression that people, real people out there, are reading it, getting excited over the energetic prose and maybe getting fired up and/or laughing. That's real.
But to actually try doing some of these things? Well, after half-an-hour riding horses in France, he'd have noticed they're a lot like horses elsewhere, and also be pretty chafed and ready to get off but not sure how to ask that in French. If he bought 10 grand worth of peanut butter, he'd realize two things: someone has to pay the bill, with real money that's generally hard to get, and peanut butter has an expiry date like everything else (and it's sooner than you'd think...), so he just wasted, like, $9970 that he now can't use to pay for overpriced hotel rooms and pay-per-view (if that were enjoyable itself...).
Come to think of it, this is a pretty good capture of the concept of happiness that is pushed by advertising. More, more, and more shit, all at once! -- that's happiness. If a rare, thick steak is nice, then surely a rarer, thicker steak is nicer! If sex is pleasurable, then surely more sex with more people is still more pleasurable! Doing anything that people on TV do must be amazingly fun, because they look so happy (and toned and suntanned and...)!
(Of course it's correct -- I mean, that's why lottery winners are all so happy with life. right?).
beautiful ! here is one by samuel-ullman which a lot of folks here might already have known:
Youth is not a time of life; it is a state of mind; it is not a matter
of rosy cheeks, red lips and supple knees; it is a matter of the will,
a quality of the imagination, a vigor of the emotions; it is the
freshness of the deep springs of life.
Youth means a temperamental predominance of courage over timidity of
the appetite, for adventure over the love of ease. This often exists
in a man of sixty more than a boy of twenty. Nobody grows old merely
by a number of years. We grow old by deserting our ideals.
Years may wrinkle the skin, but to give up enthusiasm wrinkles the
soul. Worry, fear, self-distrust bows the heart and turns the spirit
back to dust.
Whether sixty or sixteen, there is in every human being's heart the
lure of wonder, the unfailing child-like appetite of what's next, and
the joy of the game of living. In the center of your heart and my
heart there is a wireless station; so long as it receives messages of
beauty, hope, cheer, courage and power from men and from the infinite,
so long are you young.
When the aerials are down, and your spirit is covered with snows of
cynicism and the ice of pessimism, then you are grown old, even at
twenty, but as long as your aerials are up, to catch the waves of
optimism, there is hope you may die young at eighty.
I would have written something similar, but recently came across: http://www.salon.com/life/since_you_asked/2010/07/27/back_fr..., which, including the comments, put the same message in so many different ways that I don't feel I have anything to add to it.
So it's circular, you're saying? I don't disagree, but this is not ultimately very satisfying to someone who'd like meaning in their life. It amounts to saying "Don't want that, then", does it not? :)
Why should meaning to your life be supplied externally ?
That's a hidden way of arguing there can be no meaning to life without a creator, a feeling that religions the world over have handily exploited.
Meaning can derive from yourself, you can feel good about your own acts within your own reference frame of morality that you have derived from your experience with the world.
There's nothing wrong with that and it is just as satisfying, or even more so than some externally supplied meaning.
I'm not sure how a creator would help provide meaning. If World of Warcraft characters were actually self-aware people, would providing fun for players really be the highest meaning they could aspire to? If not, why would a hypothetical creator's plan for us have any particular bearing on what we ought to do?
Meaning can derive from yourself, you can feel good about your own acts
I can feel good about shooting heroin, but that doesn't mean it's right (or that it's not!). It really ends up sounding like "Do what makes you feel good, and try not to think too much about why it makes you feel good". That's not necessarily bad, but I haven't seen any argument that it is good, other than that it's not necessarily bad.
If what you're looking for is what's most satisfying, I'll agree that introspection and experiment will tell you that. If you're looking for what you ought to do, what's really "meaningful", it's not at all clear to me what can tell you that. Or that anything can, or that it's even a question with an answer. At least if there's no answer, continuing to think about the question can't be wrong. ;)
A creator would be able to provide meaning for the last person 'in the system' who wouldn't be able to point at someone else to provide his/her meaning.
World of warcraft characters are not self aware, but if they were, my point is exactly that they could aspire to higher meaning than fun for players, by their own standards of morality and what they choose to be fulfilling.
You can feel good about shooting heroin, for a little while, and then you'll realise that it is not all it is cracked (pun intended) up to be. So you will most likely either revise your value system or you'll die of an overdose.
Just doing what makes you feel good is not a very good system of morality, since it obviously allows you to do good to yourself at the expense of others. People that have such tendencies are usually labelled either unable to empathise or psychopaths depending on how far they go in their pursuits.
What you 'ought' to do, is to try to define a set of rules for yourself that start from axiomatic things that any healthy and well thinking person can perceive as 'good'.
It's not a coincidence that most laws tend to start off from basic principles like 'property is ok' and 'killing is not' and work out a whole series of codified laws from there.
For a moral viewpoint on life and a feeling of satisfaction you could very well do the same, on your own almost without external input.
Some people will come up with extremely selfish sets of rules, which is fine as long as they fit within the legal framework and make them feel good, some will do much better than that.
And some will fail, and end up in jail or become ostracised from society.
Dying of an overdose or doing well at the expense of others are things that most people can agree are things we ought not to want. But I haven't found a reason that I ought not to want those, ultimately. It just so happens that I (and most people) don't.
Whenever you see yourself saying, "you ought to"/"it's good to"/"it's moral to", notice the immediate reason that the statement seems true (assuming it does) is to satisfy some goal. You have a goal of not hurting other people (or, to say it another way, you want not to hurt other people), but while that suffices for directing your thoughts and actions on this level, if you back up a level, you'll see that this goal is in service of another goal. If human goal systems were regular and consistent, there would ultimately be a topmost goal which all this was pointing at. But that doesn't seem to be the case, so we're left shifting about aimlessly, considering only that which we happen to consider (our happiness, the happiness of others, life satisfaction, or whatever) without anything to direct what we ought to be doing.
Making up your own meaning doesn't solve this problem, but only ignores it. It might be that it's unsolvable (I currently think so, at least), but in that case, it can hardly matter that one keeps looking.
You forget existentialism has a clear definition of angst, despair and inauthentic living. That tie into what is "good" in existentialism. Essentially existentialism says yes happiness is good, but happiness supplied by drugs is an external source of happiness and is thus inauthentic. Poking yourself with needles, ie the act of consuming doesn't make you feel good, the drug does. Existentialism is in this respect where Eastern philosophies meet with the West. Read some Camus, or Sartre, but if you feel the need to see what existentialism is like with a higher power read Kierkegaard.
There are other things in live besides yourself and the empty universe, you know. In particular, other people are something external to the self that typically supply a lot of meaning for many.
Ok, let's pretend for a moment that you're an intensely weird person who finds meaning in others due to a conscious decision to self-actualize. "Hey honey, we've been going out for a while, and so I've decided to gradually incorporate you and your feelings into my rules to live by. One step at a time, of course."
Then why aren't we allowed to integrate religion into our rules to live by? Are some things "external to the self" allowed, and others disallowed?
I'm perfectly ok with you integrating religion in to your rules to live by. But you don't have to and it is nonsense that you can't find 'meaning' in life without that.
The scary thing (for me) is that I suspect the answer for a very large number of people is 'yes'. With setting your own rules comes the added burden of being responsible for the results, and plenty of people would like to be able to point to some third party when things go bad.
It's a trick question. :) If someone else had already decided the meaning of your life, you would prefer that, because they would have decided what you preferred, ultimately.
Could they could arrange it so that your purpose was X, and that you preferred that your purpose was not X? I'm not sure if that's actually consistently possible. It's certainly possible for humans to want X and not want to want X, but something with a specified highest goal might not actually be able to hold both.
The world may be empty of meaning, but it is a blank canvas on which to paint meanings of your own.
Live deliberately.
You are free.
- Anon (Edited)