Positive Nihilism
Positive Nihilism
Okay so before we start, we’re just gonna conveniently ignore the multiyear gap between this post and the last time I wrote a post. Stop thinking about it.
Anyway, I was scrolling through Instagram recently and I came across this post from the legend walking the earth known as Jacob Collier. It’s a short video, so go watch it before continuing.
You watched? Good.
So, I watched that clip over and over and realized that it aligns very nicely with my worldview, and I also realized that I’ve never really spoken about what my worldview is to anyone except for a few people. I want to be clear though that I’m not the first to come up with this point of view, nor am I the only one to espouse the benefits. I just wanna talk about it cause this is my blog.
So how exactly does this clip relate? It’s advocating for a worldview that I call “positive nihilism”. Let’s break down what that means.
Nihilism is a pretty broad philosophical viewpoint, but in popular parlance it means “the belief that everything is meaningless”. There are a lot of subgroups of this, but in practice most people who ascribe to this viewpoint fall into one of two camps: either they go for the Morty Smith viewpoint (what I call negative nihilism), or they go for the opposite.
But what exactly is the opposite? My interpretation goes like this: first, realize your insignificance in the grand scheme of everything. You exist for an infinitesimally small point in the grand scheme of time, and are an infinitesimally small speck in the larger universe as a whole. We all live on one planet, in one solar system, orbiting one star of billions in this one galaxy alone with billions of other galaxies in existence. Once that has set in and the vastness finally becomes less dauting, you then need to realize that because of your overall insignificance, and the insignificance of everyone and everything else, there is not a single person who has existed, currently exists, or will ever exist who can tell you what does and does not matter. Why? Because everything doesn’t matter in the end. Therefore, if nothing and nobody really matters in the end who am I to tell you that collecting funko pops is a waste of time or useless? Who am I to say whether or not you need a “real job”? Who am I to say that you shouldn’t feel certain emotions? We’re all equally insignificant, so the purpose and meaning of our lives can be whatever we choose it to be. We all don’t matter, so in a weird way we all do matter and should try our best to find the purpose and meaning that we think matters in our lives. This, my friends, is what I call “positive nihilism”.
If you’re interested in more academic writings about this topic, check out the works of David Hume. I won’t dive into that here. Instead, I’d like to talk about how this philosophy affects my day-to-day.
Now, with that understanding, the Jacob Collier clip suddenly hits even harder than it did huh? As someone who already subscribed to that view, hearing it from another person that I admire is a nice little boost to be sure. Anyway, that’s all I got. Hope that helps you out, dear reader, and I hope you have a good morning/day/evening/night. 拜拜 for now.
tags: philosophy - musings - nihilism