Life is Meaningless, You Are Nothing

Daily Meditation 685–1/12/2024

Disclaimer: Do not perceive this as an explicitly “religious” or “Christian” DM nor a “frustrated” excoriating of science or other ideologies. This is intended to be interpreted as a questioning or pondering.

Does it seem to anyone else that society is (increasingly) caught in a powerful maelstrom of (increasingly) negative nihilism and “atheism?” I put atheism in quotes as it isn’t necessarily everyone “labelling” themselves as “I am an atheist,” so much as it seems to be a general sentiment or a sort of undercurrent.

I ask if anyone else has felt or noticed this because the logical question (at least in my mind) is one of what good do these beliefs do for the individual? What does “believing in” (or unbelieving, perhaps) nihilism offer to us? And a not much higher up cousin, atheism, does it ensure a life of happiness or guidance, either?

Nihilism seems to be a fundamental understanding of or belief that life is essentially meaningless, short, brutish, and nasty. You’re here for a few decades then die and are buried in the dirt upon which time your consciousness ceases to be. Atheism, so far as I can tell, seems similar — “Darwin has told us the solution to the ‘mystery’ of existence, already. You’re just some other ape descendant. An animal.”