In this essay, I will discuss existential nihilism in a very personal way, my experiences and my beliefs, past and present.
At midlife, over a period of several years during which I experienced extreme cognitive dissonance, I lost my Christian faith. One night, unable to sleep, I experienced terror. For the first time I realized I was going to die, to cease to exist. Until then, without even realizing it, I had not really believed in real death. I had believed in a resurrection after death and that I would enjoy a blissful eternal life forever. To lose that belief was terrifying at first, but to my own amazement, the fear eventually faded away.
In my early fifties, I went through a difficult period that lasted for five or six years. My career had taken a severe downturn which in turn affected my finances and my marriage. I was very unhappy. To be more precise, I felt almost constant emotional pain day after day after day. My life felt totally meaningless. I began to think that my situation was hopeless and that it would never change.
One Saturday morning I went to a local restaurant for breakfast. I began to think very deliberately about ending my own life. I thought about how I would kill myself and where I would do so. At that time I was afraid that my wife would leave me and I was giving her good reasons for doing so. I was unable to change my miserable attitude and death began to look like the only way to get relief. Fortunately, my circumstances slowly improved and so did my attitude.
I have been living in Lakeside, a retirement community in Mexico, for over ten years now. I have made new friends and then lost some of them when they died. Death is a very normal occurrence in a retirement community. As I write this essay, four of my friends are battling cancer. One is terminal, another is in a clinical trial undergoing experimental treatment which looks very promising, another has a 70% chance of survival and the fourth friend has a very good prognosis. All four of these friends are at peace with their situation and each is inspiring in his or her own way.
Our community has benefited greatly from presentations by Loretta Downs, founder of Chrysalis End-of-Life Inspirations. And I am also fortunate to have Wendy Carrel, Book Ambassador and Wellness Shepard as a friend. These are two women that I trust deeply on end-of-life matters.
As I write this essay I feel no existential angst. I feel more ALIVE than ever, determined to thrive for as long as I can. I take comfort in the illusion that I could live as long as my mother who is 103 and still of sound mind.
For me, nihilism and existential angst are now mostly interesting and important topics, but ones that I can discuss with only a very few people.
I have been greatly influenced by David Chapman and his excellent website, Meaningness.
Eternalism and nihilism are the simplest, and most extreme, stances toward meaningness.
The complete stance (singular) is the most fundamental, natural one. It recognizes both meaningfulness and meaninglessness, and recognizes that they are inseparably intertwined—although some things are clearly more meaningful than others.
In 2019 Chapman wrote,
Hmm, I’ve had almost no interactions with metamodernists, so I can’t speak to that. I’m not part of the community, and only know the work from stuff I’ve read casually online. It appears that “metamodernism” is a work in progress, and different people have different ideas about what it is. I do find some of them resonant with my thoughts, though, and might get on board the movement if I had more time to investigate.
His thinking certainly prepared me for metamodernism, but as far as I know, he is still not part of the community. However, perhaps he is coming our way now. He was recently on The Stoa, Evolving Ground: 06 Guru vs Learning Relationship w/ Charlie Awbery, Jared Janes, and David Chapman.
In metamodern terms, does my life have meaning? Yes. No. BOTH/AND. It depends on context. Of the eight billion people on earth, my life has no meaning to almost all of them.
My life certainly feels meaningful to me now as I live it. My life is meaningful to my wife, my family and my friends. And their lives have meaning for me.
Objectively, the philosophical nihilist view that life is meaningless, purposeless and without intrinsic value is true. Subjectively it is false. Knowing this, accepting this, seems important to me.
I believe that facing death, facing our own complete annihilation is a key to living fully now. I believe that facing the fear of death and other fears is at least as important as other adult developmental work such as shadow work, resolving emotional trauma, using integral theory, or building on the Four Forces. Somehow, in a way that is hard to put into words, this helps me to thrive personally while accepting that the civilization in which I live is beginning to collapse.
I believe that fear is natural. We are conditioned by hundreds of thousands of years of evolution to want to survive which naturally causes us to fear death. What is not natural, but possible, is to overcome this natural fear. And many problems arise when our imagination leads us to transfer our natural fear of death in all kinds of distorted ways. Facing fears, all fears, is very worthwhile and I have written about facing My Fears.
I now live in Mexico and have some interest in its history, including Pre-Columbian Mexico. The great Maya civilization flourished for 400 years. Perhaps the Mayans thought their lives were meaningful. But not a single life from that time is meaningful today, except to a handful of anthropologists. Civilizations come and go and people fade away without mention in historical records. Likewise, a few hundred years from now, our current civilization could be gone and all traces of me with it. By any objective measure, my life is meaningless.
It is not just individual lives and whole civilizations that come and go. Stars come and go, are born and die. In about five billion years from now our sun will become a red giant and destroy the Earth. What meaning will this essay have then? None, of course, but it will have a tiny bit of meaning to a few people now, and that is good enough.
My wife, Pat, and I talk comfortably about euthanasia and have done so for years. Neither of us wants to suffer or see the other suffer. Of course, we do not know what the future will bring. But in Mexico, very aggressive use of morphine for pain management in hospice care is an option and seems humane to us.
I have accepted the possibility that our civilization could collapse at any time. Jem Bendell, a British academic, wrote a paper called “Deep Adaptation: A Map for Navigating Climate Tragedy” in 2018. In his paper, he argues that societal collapse is inevitable due to climate change and that it will lead to the death of billions of people. Again, my life is proof that it is possible to live with the knowledge of the possibility that billions of people may die and still be high on the scale of subjective well-being. However, I do have radical hope that disaster will be averted.
Since February 24, 2022, the world has lived with a higher probability of a nuclear WWIII. I wrote an essay About the Russian Invasion of Ukraine. At that time, day after day I had a line from a 1980s rock song on a loop in my head: It's the End of the World as We Know It (And I Feel Fine). In a paradox that I do not fully understand, I seem to be able to hold both the potential of global catastrophe and a sense of personal thriving at the same time.
On June 8, 2023, Nate Hagens broadcasted his alarming message, NATO/Ukraine: Playing Russian Roulette with Complex Life | Frankly #33. He stated that the biggest risk we all face in the next couple of months is a nuclear WWIII. Such a war would collapse civilization. Millions, perhaps billions, would die. I could die. Facing this is facing nihilism.
Yet I do not feel despair and I wonder why. I am almost embarrassed by my lack of negative emotions in the face of existential risks. I was struck by some words written recently by Brendan Graham Dempsey:
...if you’ve truly learned the art of mythmaking, of transforming accident into design, you will know what meaning’s really made of; you will be immune to despair... This means saying Yes, even to the devastated life; Yes, to total disaster. Yes, to all of it, just as it is...
I do not believe that any aspect of my being will remain after my death. I doubt that I will somehow join some kind of cosmic consciousness. That idea is meaningless to me but I also try to remain open to that possibility. I accept that others have good reasons to believe. My good friend David Bryen had a powerful ten-year experience which he describes as an encounter with cosmic forces which he labels The Divine Feminine. He believes that he was a portal to something beyond our known universe and that belief added meaning to his life. There is nothing about my friend that would suggest that he is someone prone to delusion. I do not consider belief in life after death unreasonable or irrational.
Perhaps in rebellion against nihilism and the reality of death, I have an In Memoriam section on my website. Every year I celebrate the lives of those who have died and who have touched my life in some way. I want to do my little bit to slow the fading away of these people. Nihilism does not lead me to despair. Instead, I want to celebrate life.
On June 2nd I posted the following on Emergent Commons, my favorite online community,
Beyond Nihilism
8 Weeks Masterclass by
Professor John Vervaeke
Begins June 27th, 2023
https://halkyonacademy.teachable.com/p/beyond-nihilism
$649
I have growing concerns about the nature of some commerce I see in the SPACE.
Nilihism is a very important and very difficult issue. Seeing this course has motivated me to begin thinking about writing an essay About Nihilism. When completed, I will share it for free.
And I believe that if ten Emergent Commons members each wrote an essay about nihilism, sharing our personal experience, together we would probably create something as good as what Vervaeke sells.
It is possible the next Buddha will not take the form of an individual. The next Buddha may take the form of a community, a community practicing understanding and lovingkindness, a community practicing mindful living. And the practice can be carried out as a group, as a city, as a nation. Thich Nhat Hanh 1993
I am seriously interested in a collective inquiry into nihilism. A few members of Emergent Commons commented on my post. One member indicated that she would write an essay and she did.
Beyond Nihilism
by Claudia Dommaschk
I posted some quotes from her article at Emergent Commons and made the following comments:
Claudia, I have been anticipating your article on nihilism for days, eagerly wondering what you had to say. And you have surprised me, going in a direction I had not imagined. And I understand, deeply understand.
YES! Running as a spiritual practice to keep nihilism at bay.
People love to signal by sharing their embodied practices. Using the word embodied has become a signal of spirituality. Breath work, felt sense, movement... all good stuff. But yours is the first mention at EC of running in this context. And I am with you on this as I have been running for 55 years. I now consider it to be something more than just a physical practice.
I once saw some research linking the experience of the rhythm of running and the rhythm of druming as a transformational experience, an interesting idea.
I do not disparage those who seek connection with the Divine. But I relate more as you do, here and there, now and then. And that intimate space between does not arise with every EC member, but it feels special when it does.
Hopefully, some EC members will join this discussion. For those that do, you are invited to focus on Claudia's article, how she links nihilism, running and connection. Or whatever her article sparks in you.
On July 4, 2023 Samo Burja, a geopolitical strategist worth paying attention to, tweeted:
They don't wish to think uncomfortable thoughts about our own civilization's death. Yet, the death of our own civilization is as inevitable as our own personal deaths. Perhaps one day we will find a way to avoid one or the other death. Not yet there.