Heartbreak
When I was 16 years old, I fell in love and got my heart broken. Teenagers deal with their first heartbreak in many ways but I chose to deal with it by diving into philosophy and asking myself some deep questions: What is love? What is life? Why am I alive? What am I supposed to do with my life? What is the meaning of life?
It didn’t take me long to realize that religion is a lie, God most probably doesn’t exist and there’s no objective meaning to life. On facing nihilism, I had the common response of depression and an existential crisis. Over the years, I developed a “who gives a shit?” attitude and a three word philosophy of “everything is bullshit”. This would become my refuge when life got too depressing to bear. I would shrug my shoulders, say “fuck it!” and laugh at the absurdity of it all.
Failed Attempts
But I would always return to try and make some sense of life. I tried many existing philosophies and ideas. I tried to be spiritual. I looked into Buddhism, Vedanta, Sri Aurobindo, Jiddu Krishnamurti. I tried to focus on giving my life my own personal meaning and purpose. I decided to pursue my passions and dare to chase my dreams. Sometimes I got into self-help and hustle culture and tried to work hard and be disciplined and chase success. I tried following Steve Pavlina for a while. I tried using Aristotle’s virtuous mean idea to develop my character. I tried applying Robert M. Pirsig’s Metaphysics of Quality and Ayn Rand’s objectivism. I even tried to develop my own philosophy a couple of times. None of it worked for long, if at all. At other times I used the same coping mechanisms as everyone else; consumerism, food, escapism through content consumption, getting too caught up in world politics and twice I almost got sucked into ideologies. Ironically, first it was communism and then later it was the alt-right.
Signs of the Crisis
Many people have experienced something similar in their life. The effects of nihilism are visible in rising depression and loneliness even though we’ve never been more connected before. Mindless consumerism and hedonism, shallow celebrity culture and pursuit of fame, endless content consumption etc. are all signs of an underlying ‘lost-ness’ that comes with losing old meaning structures and not having anything new to support us. Political ideologies have replaced religion in many places, while religion is making a comeback in other places.
Our stories also point to how our collective consciousness is trying to figure out how to move forward. On one hand we have popular movie franchises whose following resembles religious cults; on the other hand, we have superhero stories offering a new kind of mythology. Some stories try to subvert old narratives by showing old characters who were villains as protagonists, while others reaffirm their commitment to the hero’s journey and even go as far as the chosen one trope; a life that has so much meaning that it controls the destiny of the entire world. And most significant are the meta-stories that are aware of being a story and the characters try to figure out how to live when you know that the meaning of your life is just a fiction.
Humanity hasn’t been able to figure out how to deal with the nihilism that emerges out of applying reason and rationality to our older myth and faith-based systems of meaning. We all experience this meaning crisis in one way or another but the problem belongs to the entire group; the global human civilization. Half of the world hasn’t even lost their faith yet, but eventually all of us will have to face nihilism and make our peace with the fact that our existence is meaningless.
Changing Perspective
I think, I’ve made some progress in this regard. Because of my unique personality and geographic, economic and temporal location in the timeline of humanity, I’ve neither been able to accept any of the half-cures to nihilism, nor have I been able to get completely lost in the distractions of our time. I’ve had to live in the void and get used to it. And I’ve got to tell you, it’s not that bad.
My first realization that led me to this Open-Source Philosophy Development path was that the meaning crisis, or more accurately the meaninglessness crisis, can’t be solved by focusing on the ‘meaning’ part; it can only be solved by looking at the ‘crisis’ part. Most of us were born into some kind of non-nihilistic philosophy that made us believe that our life has some kind of meaning and purpose. The crisis is then not to be blamed on the nihilism, brought on by reason; it is the fault of the belief system we were indoctrinated into from childhood. The solution to the crisis is simple: stop having a crisis. Stop throwing a tantrum now that you’ve realized that you were made to believe in something that doesn’t exist. We just need to grow up.
The next realization was that nihilism means to not ‘believe’ in anything. But it doesn’t say anything about ‘knowing’ things. What does a true nihilist do when they’re hungry? Do they say, “Well I don’t believe that food will make me feel better; I don’t believe that being not hungry is better than being hungry and I don’t even believe if food is real at all, so I’m not going to eat!” Of course not. They eat when hungry and drink water when thirsty. They pull their hand back if you put it over a flame. How do they do these things if they are a true nihilist and don’t believe in anything? Well, they do it because they ‘know’ these things.
In traditional philosophy all knowledge is considered to be a subset of beliefs but I disagree with this structure for arranging human ideas. I think a nihilist can still know many things. Like things that we know instinctively; things our bodies know from millions of years of evolution; things we know from experience and things we know through science. That’s why I’m building a nihilist philosophy based on what we know.
Rudya Aditya 
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