While I understand this approach, it's not that nothing matters, it's that the esteem of people you don't admire doesn't matter.
Here's a thought experiment: if you are able to see a the still mostly full moon tonight, and luckier still if you can actually see some stars, when you look at the moon, consider that you are actually looking down at it. You, as a person are hanging over it sort of perpendicularly to the surface of this sphere. Keep your eyes on it long enough that you see it move just so imperceptibly slowly, until you feel a bit dizzy or get a bit of vertigo from the motion. From this vantage point of hanging off the side of a sphere, it's like seeing the moon for the first time, and once you have seen the movement you will recognize in that moment that you are _on_ a planet, which is suddenly finite with an obvious curvature, and the most immediate question is, what the hell is this thing and how is it possible we can distract ourselves from contemplating it?
It is the literal definition of physical perspective, where when you view the moon as downward from you, it makes everything here seem both finite and possible. The stars when you look down or out at them become asymptotic points on a blanket-like manifold. The mistake was that we think these things were merely "up," and things "down" here are the sum of the real. I think when you see how we are situated relative to the moon, other planets, and stars without the narrative filter of a self that looks inward, it's not that nothing matters, it's that anything that obfuscates this sense of clarity you can get about our place in the cosmos just from looking down the hollow space between us and the moon - is necessarily absurd.
Marriage counselors warn that we do the same thing to our partners. We automate our perception of them, as well as our reactions to them. Hence, at some point, we no longer really see them. Not lack of love, but our brain trying to save energy might be the cause of most divorces and split-ups.
(I wonder if there is also Flanderization going on, like discussed here yesterday.)
That is an interesting point. I would also think that the degree of amazing actions from partners isn't uniform; routine actions don't warrant amazement and people doing amazing things for their partners isn't happening every time all the time. Your point stands valid though - we do do that.
I realized this one evening driving under the stary sky. I had a full-blown panic attack. It's been 15 years and I still have trouble driving under the sky. I guess I'm basically agoraphobic, but after some googling it's probably better described by spacephobia, although I'm not convinced that's it either, I wonder if there is a perspective based phobia.
When my son was 19, he insisted on taking a solo trip to New Zealand. As it happens, he hiked around and worked on farms and generally had a great experience. But naturally at the time I was concerned that he have a safe trip and a good experience. After I said goodbye to him at the airport, I went home and wrote a poem. It incorporates the moment when I first experienced this perception of the moon:
On Leaving for New Zealand
Once on a morning in deep winter
I spied the moon almost full but not quite
Over the roof of the house where
I was delivering the morning newspaper.
Between splayed branches
Earthshine making its roundness plain
To show that it was a rock suspended
Like the earth around, solid but floating too.
In those days there was no son
Or daughter, or wife or plan.
I could not guess what things would be
Or where my route would take me.
Yet now if I stood on the moon’s dark plain
And looked down from there, I might see
My son standing on the far southern sphere
Looking back up at me.
There is an interesting catalog for an art exhibit whose theme turns on technologies, camera, telescope, microscope, as having altered the imaginative consciousness of humanity.
As I recall, the curators argue these technologies diminished our capacity for awe in the numinal when they depict the cosmos as it really exists.
Cosmos: From Romanticism to the Avant-garde. Jean Clair, Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona · 1999
I’ve also heard the counter theory from a film professor of mine in college, Charles Chess. He argued film has the power to manifest strong emotional reactions which our mind/consciousness suppresses.
Offered as proof of his belief, he related the story of a film class field trip to a slaughter house, followed by the class screening the film “Blood of the Beasts”
(Original title: Le sang des bêtes. 1949. 22 minutes). Only the film caused students to feel sick, or so he says.
I have to ask, do you listen to Sam Harris' podcast? His last two episodes have touched on both aspects of your post - the paradigmatic shift that can occur simply by changing the perspective from which you view something as simple as looking at the moon, and the nature of status and the status games humans play.
Actually, why should anything matter? Why do people have kids, if in a few generations no one's going to remember anything among millions of humans? Population growth can actually make human life on the planet unsustainable, as garbage builds up and resources dwindle. Coming from an atheist point of view, let's say, what's the point of humans having a replacement rate when a smaller population can be a lot richer and better off?
Why build anything when in 20 years computers will do it better? All that software you wrote, why even do it? All those stories and art can now be remixed. The hive mind will have the answer to every question better than the people who bicker about stuff they don't even know about. Who cares about their opinion? In a couple decades, who needs them to even work? To tell jokes? To have sex? Do we need to pay the next generation all a UBI to make sure they get their needs met?
We may as well build a virtual reality for ourselves to experience whatever we want since it all doesn't really matter, right?
This is a long winded way to dance around nihilism.
Nihilism is much like a hidden tarpit on the philosophical journey. Easy to fall into and get stuck. Necessary in a way, but not the place to dwell. A primary thing to point out is perception of meaning is flexible and not static, and things don't need "to matter". Meaning is an emergent phenomenon of relationships.
As an example: Doing meaningful computer work is about the relationship between the coder, the computer, and the emotional/physical rewards of completing the work. If you define the relationship of "computer work now" vs "computer work in 20 years" that edge in our meaning graph is going to have a value bending towards not mattering at all.
> what's the point of humans having a replacement rate when a smaller population can be a lot richer and better off?
Sidebar: this is also probably wrong as far as I understand. Modern wealth is built off of leveraging large populations / economics of scale and has this implied requirement of growth to maintain stability. Until things are completely automated (AKA we have robots capable of matching a human's productivity) a smaller population would imply a population collapse which would not be good in the short term.
> what's the point of humans having a replacement rate when a smaller population can be a lot richer and better off?
It's arguable whether a smaller population can be a lot richer and better off. More people = More specialization and more minds solving problems = faster advancement = better living for everyone.
Yes I get you can make your own progression that goes negative. The point is not that more people = better. It's that less people = better is not a fact, it's an opinion or conjecture
To me there is a massive difference between “mattering” and “having worth”. I don’t believe anything matters, but I do believe there are things that are worth doing and there are ways of behaving that are worth following.
I’m not a philosopher so I’m probably not explaining myself well, but I don’t think anything at all matters in an existential sense. Whether I live or get hit by a bus and die tomorrow or whatever, it’s not important. However, I do think there are many things that are worthy. Helping other people, trying not to harm anything, being kind etc., I believe these things are all very worthy of doing, but I don’t think they matter.
I wish I knew what the philosophical terms for what I’m describing as “matter” and “have worth” were
I'm not sure why you'd think things you do have such little impact on the world?
In reality, it doesn't matter what you are doing if it can survive for a long time then it will eventually have a relatively high impact on humanity. Think of the things we see in museums: shaped rocks, ceramics, rudimentary art, bones. Anything that has survived for hundreds, thousands, millions of years is worth very much to us as humans because we are junk collectors.
In that regard, what's more durable than our genes being passed on? Reproduction is one of the easiest way to ensure some bits of your information are conserved. But in reality, anything you do has some kind of impact in the world; though I would say it's impossible to quantify and it's impossible to tell if what we do has a positive or negative impact.
With this in mind, why would anything matter? In reality, first we need to ask ourselves if we think our own present experience is valuable. Not everyone will agree. But if you think that you existing right now is desirable then you may agree that others existing right now is also valuable, from here, it's easy to think that others existing in the future is valuable. This, coupled with, the work of others in the past has been valuable to me in the present will give you that the work of people in the present will be valuable to other's existence in the future. And because it's not possible to really quantify whose work is how valuable at which point in time it's easy to say "my work, regardless of what it is, may become valuable to someone's existence in the future".
But as I said, if you think of things from this perspective, you might want to try and do things that will live through as many years as possible in order to maximise the chance of them directly influencing people's lives in the future. I think the digital age might prove very useful, if we build these repositories and we manage to keep them alive for as long as humanity exists. I mean, right now people's work are being used to train all kinds of artificial intelligence that do all sorts of cool stuff. They're data points, each almost as useful as the next one.
So yeah, the real pain point of nihilism is actually thinking the present matters; rather than the future. We can't tell what's going to happen in the future, but we know the past is valuable for the present and so it's very easy to concede that the present may be valuable for the future.
The video game Outer Wilds (not to be confused with The Outer Worlds) among its many merits is excellent at conveying a sense of falling as you leave orbit from various rocks in space. As a bonus, it's also about time, basically a sci-fi exercise on Groundhog Day.
> when you look at the moon, consider that you are actually looking down at it. >You, as a person are hanging over it sort of perpendicularly to the surface of >this sphere.
You'll get the flat moon theorists all riled up with that sort of talk...
I've read books whose gist is the same point this author makes, and I agree it's such a freeing realization.
Out of the estimated 117 billion[1] humans who have walked the Earth, how many who have died can we actually name off the top of our heads? A few hundred at best? Maybe a few thousand if you're a history buff? And of that group, how many will still be remembered at the heat death of the universe? I'd bet money that the answer is "none of them".
So what's the point of trying to be remembered or leave a legacy? It's a game that we're destined to lose, so why play? Personally, I don't care how big my gravestone is, or whether I have my name on the side of a building, or whether I have an element in the periodic table named after me. Because it'll all come crumbling down in the end. This too shall pass.
And rather than being depressing, it's actually liberating. It means I'm done climbing the corporate ladder. It means I can work just hard enough to pay the bills at my day job, while leaving ample free time to engage with creative pursuits that satisfy me. It means I can have kids if it makes me happy, but I don't feel pressured to out of a sense of "continuing the family line" or some other bullshit.
No matter how hard I try, literally nothing you or I do will be remembered on a long enough timespan. Hell, I don't even know the names of my great-grandparents, and chances are that, if I ever have kids, my great-grandkids won't remember mine. It's like Carl Sagan's "Pale Blue Dot" quote[2]. I don't know what the meaning of life is, but I'm pretty sure it's not "try to wrest some sort of immortality by being remembered after you're gone".
Well, if we're going by the metric of what will be remembered for the longest time, then the most important things are to bring people together [1]; find true love [2]; and make sure you don't sell shoddy, low-grade copper. [3]
> ...make sure you don't sell shoddy, low-grade copper. [3]
I wish I could be around in 10,000 years when future historians are puzzling over a digital document that they think is of extreme historical significance, but is actually some angry Karen's 1-star Yelp review for a Cheesecake Factory in Little Rock, Arkansas.
So my nerdiness is a very particular niche and a book about certain conference on Episcopalian growing pains called Shaping Our Future happened to fit into it, like nobody I show this book to seems to find it interesting but me, haha.
But one of the talks given at that Episcopalian conference claimed, much to my shock, that we needed more little kids running around during the church service, not less... even raising the idea that maybe children's ministry breakaways were not correct. What unimaginable chaos did they intend for my solemn-leaning Catholic-raised soul? Never! But then the talk quoted a different work by Stanley Hauerwas,
> The Christian community’s openness to new life and our conviction of the sovereignty of God over that life are but two sides of the same conviction. Christians believe that we have the time in this existence to care for new life, especially as such life is dependent and vulnerable, because it is not our task to rule this world or to “make our mark on history.” We can thus take the time to live in history as God’s people who have nothing more important to do than to have and care for children.
[emphasis mine.]
So there I was running around, trying to make my mark on history, it was not going especially well heh... Really marked a big shift in my attitudes.
What if caring for new life is of no interest to someone? This advice just sounds like pigeonholing people into roles, making sure people know their place, and don't ask too many questions.
So I don't necessarily want to get too far into this because this is HN and religious discussion kind of doesn't belong here... But let me say very briefly that if someone calls themselves a Christian but mocks you for not having children, then in the selfsame breath they are mocking every modern Catholic priest; most monks, nuns, and hermits; the guy who wrote half of the New Testament; and yes, even Jesus himself. So that the community as a whole is open to New Life and that each individual person feels like they are not in a rush and could potentially parent children if that is the gift that they are called to, should never be mistaken for a requirement that each individual person must do whatever they can to have children.
> "We can thus take the time to live in history as God’s people who have nothing more important to do than to *have* and care for children."
I think this statement is very problematic, especially if you want to be inclusive to the childless or celibate. In the end, it's not an applicable answer for everyone. It's only an answer for those who have already subscribed at some level to that belief, thus I find it unsatisfactory.
It is not offense, it is a logical analysis of the statement. This is the perfect forum for such analysis. If it's not the correct forum for my analysis, then it is not the correct forum to be posting such statements in the first place.
I would say it is the opposite: the formula "you can thus take the time to live in history" is quite a celebration of freedom.
Very many feel a call for making a family, the said idea blesses them encouraging them to follow that call without reticence. And the formula in no way seems limited to making a family: "live in history" has the highest degree of freedom, in one direction.
You are making no sense. The statement "consider yourself free to take the time to live in history" means "you can follow your own projects - as opposed to devoting oneself on a single task".
How can you read that «as constraint and limitation»? You cannot read a banana into a pigeon if not for performance art. What has «think[ing] for themselves» to do with the said concept?! It is fully inconsequential. According to which mysterious theorem should "consider yourself free to be active in the world" have any relation to cognitive dependence?!
It is an abuse of the statement when it's immediately contradicted by explicitly setting a specific task as "most important". I read how it was written as "don't be too ambitious, don't be worldly, have a lot of kids", a regressive viewpoint.
I wrote about pigeonholing adults into the role of child caregiver, constraining their opportunities to do something else with their life. What they quoted applied to adults, not children.
Note that some other traditions of gatherings do have children running around during the service... It is like being a point inside an area of brownian motion. Yes, it does not facilitate - but it more mirrors the reality of being in the world, "«unimaginable chaos»" and nonetheless ("nobody told you you will practice in natural lab conditions"). The children would make a smoothed progress from natural encounter to discipline (of course meaning self-discipline).
Note also that the suggestion was about chaos in the «service», not in the monastery.
> It means I'm done climbing the corporate ladder. It means I can work just hard enough to pay the bills at my day job, while leaving ample free time to engage with creative pursuits that satisfy me.
Not so fast there buddy.
The reason for climbing corporate ladders is to enrich your own life and give you more wealth, which can make your life far more comfortable and gain you respect and recognition amongst peers when it is most valuable: while you are alive.
Even if you could be remembered all throughout time and even past the heat death of the universe, it would be pointless because you are dead and cannot experience this fame. You wouldn’t care either way, that’s what makes death so final.
If you are not careful, you could just end up as a wage slave contributing to the rise of someone else’s awesome life. And then you can experience the pain of being forgotten when it hurts the most: while you are still alive. You won’t have to wait till the heat death of the universe to finally be forgotten, people can just stop giving a shit about you right now. Keep climbing.
> The reason for climbing corporate ladders is to enrich your own life and give you more wealth, which can make your life far more comfortable and gain you respect and recognition amongst peers...
But that's the thing- I don't actually need any of those things. My upper-middle class life is already comfortable. My peers already respect me. Sure, there could always be more money and respect, but that would always be the case, no matter how high I climb. There will always be someone with more money and respect than I have. There is no "Final Boss". Even Elon Musk (currently the world's richest person) probably compares himself with historical figures whose wealth would put his to shame (Alexander The Great, Mansa Musa, Marcus Licinius Crassus, etc.).
It's like the old (and probably apocryphal) story of the conversation between Joseph Heller and Kurt Vonnegut [1]. I have something the ladder climbers will never have- enough. I can either continue deferring happiness until I reach the next rung of the ladder (and there's always another rung), or I can decline to climb at all and choose happiness today, right now.
> My upper-middle class life is already comfortable.
That’s pretty typical. One says that money or status doesn’t matter. Then you prod them and it specifically doesn’t matter to get more of it—to the person that already has more of it than most people.
Yesterday I drove out into the Arizona desert and gazed upon the stars. I didn’t think about my non-mortgage debt (because I have none); I didn’t worry about my interpersonal relationships at my job (because I have so much seniority now that I don’t have to worry about my boss being a complete asshole); I didn’t worry about what people might think of me (because I have a large social network and in fact I am meeting some friends for dinner right after this stargazing session); I didn’t worry about comparing myself to my peers (because they already respect me and my accomplishments/family/prestige). Then I stayed there for a good fifteen minutes, gazing at the stars, thinking about the vastness of the cosmos and conflated me having satisfied all my material needs, my close relationship needs, and my peer-respect needs with having gotten insight into the meaning of life.
I'm struggling to decide whether or not this is sarcasm, because...
>Not so fast there buddy.
... I feel the urge to tell you the same.
>The reason for climbing corporate ladders is to enrich your own life and give you more wealth, which can make your life far more comfortable and gain you respect and recognition amongst peers when it is most valuable: while you are alive.
It sounds like "respect and recognition amongst peers" is more important to you (which is fine btw, no judgement) than it is to OP, but most of your post seems to suggest that that's where OP should be placing their importance. In point of fact, it sounds like they have already determined what is important to them, have worked to achieve it and are happy with where they're at.
>If you are not careful, you could just end up as a wage slave contributing to the rise of someone else’s awesome life.
... so? I don't mean to speak for OP with the comment I'm about to make, but for me, I don't care. As long as I can pay my bills, and then have enough money for my creative and extracurricular endeavors, then I'm perfectly happy. I don't care if that means that my position somewhere on the career ladder means that someone else is having a more "awesome" life than me somewhere else, because they're truly not. Their life is theirs, mine is mine, and I'm happy with mine. Hell, I'd even call mine "awesome".
>And then you can experience the pain of being forgotten when it hurts the most: while you are still alive. You won’t have to wait till the heat death of the universe to finally be forgotten, people can just stop giving a shit about you right now. Keep climbing.
But see for me (and maybe OP? who knows?), I don't care about being recognized by my professional peers. I care about my family, my friends, and the people involved in my creative (non-work) pursuits. And those are people who I know will never give a shit where I've climbed on a corporate ladder.
Whenever someone says money doesn't matter, ask them to take them up on their offer. They always refuse. These high minded principles sound great in theory, but don't work in practice or just words. Even if existence is small and fleeting, having stuff, status, and wealth still feels good.
The reason for climbing corporate ladders is to [... and] gain you respect and recognition amongst peers when it is most valuable: while you are alive.
"Peers", maybe but that just means "other people who value climbing corporate ladders" - who tend to be quite superficial people.
Hah. Some decades in now, the people I remember most have been anything but climbers. They were just here near me and the others they cared about. If being remembered is your motivation, you don't need to go anywhere.
In fact, you're probably climbing away from the people who already recognize and respect you best already.
If you ask me, it is not about being remembered. It is about actual effect one has on the world. Some actions have tendencies to influence the world in certain ways, which we can often recognize. To do ones best to improve things does not mean to do only things others might remember. It is a far greater set of actions than that.
Relatedly, the idea that the notion of a 'self' is an illusion is similarly liberating. It takes work to remind yourself (our vocabulary doesn't help!) that this is the case, just as it takes work to remind yourself that your vision is blinded in the area where your optic nerve pokes through your eye. But there it is.
Plenty has been written about this, dating back centuries. The best distillation of it I found is in "Losing Ourselves" by Jay Garfield[0]
Both of these realizations have impressed upon me the importance of living in the moment. Of being there for others who are in need. Of trying to make the experience we all share here a bit better. Because that's all we have - the here and now.
I don't really understand this concept. I had my cofounder quote Alan Watts to me with that same thing. An illusion implies that someone is being fooled. Who is that someone, if there is no self?
Are we supposed to believe that there is no separation between us and a bunch of rocks nearby?
Personally, it seems to me that our concepts of morality and existence are just a bunch of wordplay, and the reason some question sounds "mystical" is because we omit a clause. For example, rather than saying "A should B" you should say "If A wants C to happen, then A should B". And that can be much more easily defined. Otherwise, "objective morality" makes as much sense as "objective sense of humor". Can a joke be "objectively funny" if almost no one laughs at it?
> Are we supposed to believe that there is no separation between us and a bunch of rocks nearby?
I'm not sure how the above follows from the illusion of 'self'. Despite the self being an illusion, we're still persons, and thus distinct from rocks, and everything else, including other persons.
The illusion is that there's a subject at the center of experience. I.e., we don't sense that we're identical to experience, we feel that we're having an experience. That there's some locus of control, independent of the rest of our body, including our brain, that's steering the ship. That's the illusion.
> Are we supposed to believe that there is no separation between us and a bunch of rocks nearby?
No, but our consciousness is an illusion. What separates us from other animals is how hyper-developed our prefrontal cortex is, and the sense of "future" and cause-and-effect.
I like to think that consciousness is just a side-effect of this advanced survival system. A bug, if you will. Consciousness is just a weird artefact of a biological system that has gone self-aware.
Here's a philosophical nerd snipe: we're aware of our physical limitations (i.e. our eyes can only see a limited range of wavelengths, we have a blind spot, etc.). What are the limitations of our consciousness? Our self-awareness blind spots?
I don't see life as a way to be remembered. I see life as a way to enjoy yourself and help others enjoy themselves. Following that train of thought, doing something that betters more people's lives is an arguably positive thing and many of the ways of helping others better their lives require lots of work. Who cares if no one is around after the heat death of the universe. People are alive now.
Many people's lives are pretty nice now, especially compared to say 150+ years ago where people had little time for leisure because they had to farm all day or clean clothing all day and cook.
I can certainly imagine we'll get the post scarcity world where even more people will have all their basic needs met. I'd like to be small part of helping to get us there whether or not anyone remembers me. And, I'd go even further, it's better than a life of "not giving a fuck because nothing matters".
"not giving a fuck because nothing matters" to me means you can murder people because nothing matters. It's all just space dust so who cares if you rearrange that pile of space dust from a thinking feeling person into a pile a goo. I don't buy into that.
> "not giving a fuck because nothing matters" to me means you can murder people because nothing matters
I don't think that's true. I've lived like nothing matters for most of my adult life, yet I have no desire nor stomach to hurt people on purpose.
It's like that misbelief religious people have about atheism: if there's no God, there's no ethics. That's completely wrong. Believing that nothing matters doesn't turn me into a psychopath.
I'm also atheist. But if I take the position that nothing matters then I mean that, nothing matters, that includes the suffering of others. If you disagree then like me, you agree something actually matters.
So are you saying you do things just so people remember you?
I wonder where would we as a species be if Newton or Einstein or Steve Jobs and a million others who contributed their little might to advancing our species forward thought the same?
There is some irony there in that it seems Steve Jobs did in fact do a lot to specifically be remembered, since we now have people ranking him in the same sentence as Newton or Einstein despite essentially being a semi-luxury good salesman.
I actually wonder if Steve Jobs will be remembered hundreds of years in the future. I have less doubts about Newton and Einstein, but Jobs... in the grand scheme of things, his contributions seem trivial. Not to diminish what they mean to us a decade after his death, but hundreds of years down the road?
> So are you saying you do things just so people remember you?
No, that's the opposite of what I'm saying.
> I wonder where would we as a species be if Newton or Einstein or Steve Jobs and a million others who contributed their little might to advancing our species forward thought the same?
Is my life better because those people did what they did? Absolutely. Would I be sad if they hadn't existed, or had lived a less noteworthy life? Probably not, because I wouldn't know any better.
If you Google "Who was the smartest person in history?", you'll probably encounter the name William James Sidis, who reportedly had taught himself multiple languages (and invented another) by the age of 8. In 1925 he wrote a book called "The Animate and the Inanimate", which (among other things) predicted the existence of black holes almost 15 years before Einstein did. And yet, we'll never know what ground-breaking work he could have done or advancements he could have made.
Because he chose to live a life of solitude, and died of a brain hemorrhage at the age of 46.
Imagine for a minute that I could travel to an alternate universe, one where Sidis became the next Newton and made incredible discoveries that advanced the course of human knowledge and contributed to countless new discoveries to which I bore witness. I might be more depressed as a result, if I saw how much better off humanity's lot was. But imagine if I saw that we'd be worse off. Maybe Sidis would have discovered scientific principles which would have been usurped by Hitler or the like to build weapons that made the atom bomb looks like a child's toy, and which humanity used to destroy itself. If that's what I saw in this alternate universe, I'd be happier since I'd know that we had avoided that fate. Odds are, his contributions would have been a bit of a mixed bag.
But it doesn't matter, because I can't mourn what I can't see.
The answer to "where will we as a species be?" is (eventually) "consigned to the dustbin of history". We can make every effort to be the next Newton or Einstein or Steve Jobs. And if we make someone else's life more comfortable or interesting or fun or whatever in the meantime, I'd argue that's a worthy pursuit.
But re-read that Carl Sagan quote I linked to earlier [1], and think about how insignificant their contributions were in the grand scheme of things. I hope they enjoyed themselves while they were alive. Because now that they're gone, the clock is ticking on their legacy. Think of the most famous person you can (Jesus, Gandhi, etc.), and know that there will come a day when someone will utter that person's name for the last time.
You don't owe the future of humanity anything. Nor did Newton, Einstein, or Jobs. That hypothetical future humanity doesn't even exist yet, and given our trajectory as a species, it's almost hubris to assume that they will.
Your post really intrigued me and now I have to read the book. If anyone else wants to read it as well, it’s available in multiple formats from the internet archive:
I don’t buy it personally. The logic you give to suggest we don’t have a responsibility to help others seems like it would also just as well imply we can feel free to hurt others, and I disagree with that.
Finally, within the frame of our social existence: we enjoy a lot of benefits that we inherit from our ancestors and I think it’s our responsibility to pay that forward to future generations. We should maintain what we have inherited and if possible improve the state of things as well. But, of course, we should also be concerned with our personal enjoyment as well.
> ...seems like it would also just as well imply we can feel free to hurt others, and I disagree with that.
I would disagree with that as well. I'd simply argue that the reason why we shouldn't feel free to hurt others is because we likely wouldn't want others to hurt us, and their feelings are just as valid as ours.
I've got a quote (some would say a cliché?) for most situations, including this one:
"Don't ask yourself what the world needs. Ask yourself what makes you come alive, and go do that, because what the world needs is people who have come alive."
-Howard Thurman
If people "come alive" by helping society, then that's great. But "helping society" can be defined in many ways, big and small. If someone's definition of "helping society" is being a street busker and lifting someone's spirit with their music, who am I to judge?
At the end of the day, it all comes down to what is more important for you as opposed to what others think should be more important for you. We are nothing but our choices and experiences that come out of those. That is how I try to live my life despite the weird expectations the community I come from has from me. I simply don't care about what others think and that is just an incredible feeling.
Projected or perceived legacy after passing is correlated with level of consumption while alive.
Always has and always will be. Roman Emperors, Kings etc. they got to be on coins and have monuments erected after them after their death, AND at the same time they were the person with the most conspicous consumption in the whole country while still alive.
Consumption seems like a never-ending treadmill of its own. I'm quite the foodie, but I've made peace with the fact that there will always be more restaurants out there than I can possibly hope to dine at during my lifetime. You could say the same thing about music, art, etc.
It's like Bud Fox said in the movie "Wall Street"- "How many yachts can you water-ski behind?"
Sure but it's always better to be at the frontier of consumption and if you are at the frotier then it becomes to push it forward in order to consume a revised and improved version of the stuff you like, or create something that doesn't exist but that in your mind you'd enjoy using.
Maybe you know something I don't, but consumption never did the trick for me. And believe me, I've engaged in some pretty hard-core consumption. Long-term travel, drugs and alcohol, material possessions, sex, etc. I'll grant you that all of it resulted in temporary elation, but none of it resulted in long-term contentment.
I hope you have better luck with it than I did. But I doubt my luck would change if I simply tried consuming even harder.
You have simply been alive for too long. Or are paying too much attention to the wider scope. One of the two or a combination of the two.
In countries where there is a fast turnover such as sub-saharn Africa, people don't have such problems. They get out in the morning trying to get more and they die way before they hit the wall of diminishing returns and for sure way before start wondering about the wider scope.
With regards to wondering too much about the wider scope it becomes perfectly clear that having a high IQ isn't always an advantage. You want to be the luckiest dumbass to achieve both maximum consumption and the ability to never ever start pondering concepts such as the wider scope or any of the unsolvable phylosphical questions
Doing things to be remembered is like putting the cart before the horse. People who we remember and cherish for what they left behind did whatever they did from a complete different context, they were most likely natural at what they did and they very likely enjoyed every moment of it and working hard wasn’t imposed from the outside.
This hit me while wandering around Wells Cathedral (Somerset, UK). There are marble memorials up on the walls with people's names on them.
To be able to afford this after your death, you'd have to be rich and famous (or highly connected to the clergy, I guess). The cathedral has been there for a few hundred years, and there are a few hundred names, so roughly speaking about 25 people in each generation got their names up there. From a population of somewhere between 250K-500K (at a rough guess - there's ~500 churches in the diocese), so 1 in 10,000 people at best, maybe.
I had no idea who any of them were. Still don't. The tiny fraction of wildly successful people who could afford to have their names immortalised in marble are still forgotten.
> How insignificant am I in relation to this vast universe?
as far as we have discovered, any one of us is among the most beautiful, remarkable, complex things we know of, and on top of that we have emotions!
what's the sun? fusing hydrogen. What's Jupiter but a big hurricane? what's a black hole? these things are large, but they're lacking in subtlety, variety, and complexity compared to us. What's in between them? nothing, vast nothing. It's the rest of the universe that so far appears to be insignificant to me.
In my opinion the key is to live your life believing that (for the most part) what other people think of you is not important. Assuming you have a good moral base and are not actively doing things that are actually a detriment to society or individuals then why let some random person you barely know dictate how you feel about yourself?
That being said I think it is also important to recognize that for the smaller subset of people you do genuinely care about you should also very much care what they think of you. There are exceptions to this, of course. If you find someone excessively judging you from this group then it might be time to rethink what you are doing or if you should be invested this much in them in the first place.
"Living like nothing matters" can mean a lot of things.
On the positive side, it could mean overcoming an instinct of fear that prevents you from pursuing your true desires.
That might sound "starry-eyed" to people who are used to taking their wishes seriously and investing in realizing them.
Many people are caught in a negative feedback loop that prevents them from standing up for themselves and taking on hardship, instead wasting their energy on a maze of fear management and "less-bad" life choices.
Living "like nothing matters" represents an actually rational approach compared to this type of living, assuming you are made for it.
But "living like nothing matters" could also mean to go all-in on the hedonic treadmill of pain avoidance and insincerity, not considering future costs (see obesity, addiction etc).
Why does anyone care about their legacy? In the long run we’re all dead.
The only things one should concern themselves with are things they have the agency to change. This can be frighteningly hard to tease out sometimes, but literally all other worries are wasted cycles of a short life.
Live like the future matters and do your best to improve it. It’s the hardest game with the simplest of rules.
As Feynman put it, “what do you care what other people think?” I think the common and incorrect reading is some kind of snarky interpretation. I think the correct reading is to make an honest inventory and realize what exactly it is that gives you reason to care what other people think and what does not.
The science based counter-argument to all this is the understanding that time is eternalistic, so even though we die our lives never disappear out of existence. I choose to go the complete opposite route of the author here, and try to live each day as if it matters gravely.
"But the care of thine honour and reputation will perchance distract thee? How can that be, if thou dost look back, and consider both how quickly all things that are, are forgotten, and what an immense chaos of eternity was before, and will follow after all things: and the vanity of praise, and the inconstancy and variableness of human judgments and opinions, and the narrowness of the place, wherein it is limited and circumscribed? For the whole earth is but as one point; and of it, this inhabited part of it, is but a very little part; and of this part, how many in number, and what manner of men are they, that will commend thee?" -- Marcus Aurelius: Τὰ εἰς ἑαυτόν, 4.iii (AD 161 to 180), transl. Meric Casaubon.
The unsettling thing about people who insist that humanity is irrelevant because it's small relative to others things is that they must necessarily believe larger people are intrinsically more relevant than shorter and thinner people.
I don't understand the obsession with either side of significance or insignificance. People ought find out what works for them - and it's individual. Personally, I loved Ray Dalio's book Principles - not as a discussion of finance (which it also is!), rather as a means to help me solidify the idea of codifying my life principles. These in turn, provide tremendous meaning and support to my decision making process.
Everything, every action, every step one takes has some form of an impact on something. The question is merely whether or not as individuals we care about it. Significance is in the eye of the beholder, and measurable on a scale that you determine.
Am I insignificant compared to anything in space - absolutely. But what if my generations learn the lessons I deem important for them to learn? I might argue my impact is massive, it's now generational. Remember my name or not - but instilling and living ideals.. sounds like a large impact to me. That may not work for others. YMMV.
Going through a shitty phase (which happens often) I've been trying to cope in various ways, reaching high and low, inside and outside, for meaning and purpose and guidance.
I don't subscribe to most existing models, not out of a rebellious choice but because I cannot find or follow their logic to a satisfactory conclusion.
So far this is what I have, make of it what you will:
• There must be a default state, and a part of it must reside in everything built upon it. It doesn't make sense that something began from Nothing, but I like to think that something began from Everything.
• But it doesn't mean that a superset system can control a subset system 100% – Think of our relationship with computers and the programs running on/in them, along with all the physics involved and the virtual results.
• Veritasium's video on "Math's Fundamental Flaw" [0] was a good source of inspiration: Shit may be coded with hard immutable logic but still have virtually infinite possibilities.
• If you think your mind, or your "will" or "heart" or "soul", matters in any way and can make any difference, try to find the cutoff point between -where- that metaphysical quality starts, what sets "you" apart from everything else: What's the difference between you and every other person's mind/soul? Or a person's mind and a computer program? The difference between a world with no humans in it, and a world with 1 human? A barren asteroid and a planet with life? Can a rock access the mysteries of the Universe? Can you?
TL;DR: What you see right now may be what you will ever get, everything may just be circumstance, but there -just might- be a way to touch something greater.
Oh really? Try holding your breath for 60 seconds while telling yourself nothing matters…
You’ll get yourself in all sorts of entanglements by subscribing to these sorts of belief systems
In reality, nothing matters existentially yet everything matters in the moment. Your ability to accept both of these realities at the same time is freedom
> Oh really? Try holding your breath for 60 seconds while telling yourself nothing matters…
Is this supposed to be some enlightening statement? Even if you hold your breath until you die, still, nothing matters. You will die, and that will be the end of it. Some people who love you will be disheartened for some time, maybe til the end of their own life, but that too shall pass.
The idea is that nobody is really a nihilist when they're confronted with reality. Philosophy never survives first contact with a crisis in the moment.
You can simultaneously believe nothing matters while also not enjoy the sensation of pain. That doesn't suddenly mean avoiding pain "matters". It just means you have physiological response that makes you avoid pain.
Your response, any many others here, seem to take "nothing matters" as "life is bad, so you should just die and be done with it". Which is a weird redefinition if you think about it. The real redefinition should be "life doesn't matter, so it doesn't matter if you happen to die". Which is not the same as choosing to take action to kill yourself, or even choosing to deal with pain.
That's not really the argument I was going for, but it does have merit on its own. The idea is more that, in an intuitive sense, it's very unlikely that if you examine a self-described nihilist's life and inner mental world that they'll be able to genuinely not assign importance to at least a few things. In fact, you might say a human being is physiologically/psychologically/philosophically incapable of being a true nihilist in the way they actually behave.
If we turn to the argument you outlined and that other posters mentioned in this thread, it does raise some important (no pun intended) questions for nihilists. If a nihilist avoids the pain response and assigns no value to existence or its component parts, then why not make use of a painless suicide method? I don't recall the exact details, but you can assemble a nitrogen DYI kit in barely a few Amazon packages that just puts you to sleep peacefully. In effect, it's Benatar's asymmetry argument but remixed to apply to living beings. The nihilist is not losing anything of value when they lose their life, but they can avoid all the as of yet undefined physiological and psychological pain that they know is guaranteed for their future if they continue to live.
The nihilist will take logical steps to avoid many sensations that they don't enjoy as part of a life that has no value, or there is something about that life that they value enough to prevent themselves from taking this course of action. Either way, the idea that a human being can genuinely believe that nothing matters is in trouble because suicide methods are so painless and convenient today. If we point out that human psychology and physiology prevent us from willing the act of suicide no matter how painless, we are back to the original argument as well. In the end, a human can consider nihilism while being unable to perceive it truly, just like we can consider what extra colors a bird can see without being able to truly see them.
Why not just say things matter to persons with desires. We all create our own meaning. Avoiding pain matters “to me”. Why wouldn’t it matter just because I’m not eternal?
Riffing in what you said, I rather say “you can simultaneously believe the universe is indifferent while also believing things matter to individual beings.”
I don't know why you're getting downvoted but this is totally correct.
Which is why I don't like the Buddhist idea of getting rid of all materialistic attachments.
If you get rid of materialistic attachments you also get rid of meaning.
And while it's true, things don't mean anything in an abstract universal sense....
Human beings live in a human world not in some void in space and meaning is important to us and can give us great happiness and joy.
Obviously life means something to all of us because we're still breathing every single day and most of us wish to continue to do so.
Buddhism (as I imperfectly understand it) is not about getting rid of materialistic attachments. It’s realizing materialistic attachments are the source of suffering.
The world remains. What you do within it is up to you.
This is a common misconception about Buddhism - that non-attachment leads to Nihilism.
Here's a good overview of how the concepts of "acceptance" and "non-attachment" can be compatible with leading a meaningful and fulfilling life: https://zenstudiespodcast.com/zenacceptance/
Maybe the point is not that nothing matters, but that life is ephemeral so put your energy into the things that matter to you.
I was just telling an anecdote of when my first child was born and I took parental leave. I was shunned by some colleagues, and even my own father, for what was considered a career-limiting move. Looking back now nearly six years later, I couldn't tell you what we shipped in those weeks before or after my leave. I can barely even recall what broad initiative I was working on. But I do remember the days and nights with my wife, getting to know my child, and think about it often. Had I taken the advice of so many around me, I would have missed a once in a lifetime opportunity that I will remember and cherish for the rest of my life. Nobody will remember that about me, and the memory will be gone when I die, but it matters to me.
When I took parental leave it was during a "tense" period at my company. The Director and I had a meeting where they didn't understand why I'd be taking leave. I had monthly one on ones with this director, and was frankly expecting to have a tough talk when I got back from leave. As it happened, the director wasn't even aware that I had taken leave when I returned.
This article’s doing a bit too much, primarily by calling out that famous actors whom we recognize and care about should act like nobody will remember them, which is a bit of a dubious premise.
I do think the example is interesting because it gives us a person who, at the time, seemed so very important -- and no longer was. It gives us that metaphor of false importance.
That being said, I would agree that this post perhaps not quite achieve the philosophical thought of Albert Camus :)
Here's a thought experiment: if you are able to see a the still mostly full moon tonight, and luckier still if you can actually see some stars, when you look at the moon, consider that you are actually looking down at it. You, as a person are hanging over it sort of perpendicularly to the surface of this sphere. Keep your eyes on it long enough that you see it move just so imperceptibly slowly, until you feel a bit dizzy or get a bit of vertigo from the motion. From this vantage point of hanging off the side of a sphere, it's like seeing the moon for the first time, and once you have seen the movement you will recognize in that moment that you are _on_ a planet, which is suddenly finite with an obvious curvature, and the most immediate question is, what the hell is this thing and how is it possible we can distract ourselves from contemplating it?
It is the literal definition of physical perspective, where when you view the moon as downward from you, it makes everything here seem both finite and possible. The stars when you look down or out at them become asymptotic points on a blanket-like manifold. The mistake was that we think these things were merely "up," and things "down" here are the sum of the real. I think when you see how we are situated relative to the moon, other planets, and stars without the narrative filter of a self that looks inward, it's not that nothing matters, it's that anything that obfuscates this sense of clarity you can get about our place in the cosmos just from looking down the hollow space between us and the moon - is necessarily absurd.