The current project I’m working on is to organize the most fundamental arguments of my philosophy in their most striped down logical forms in an interconnected web like knowledgebase using Obsidian. I’ve set a rough deadline for this project to be the end of the year. Then, I’ll put some rhetorical meat on the logical skeleton and start writing the first book that will introduce my philosophy.

Along with this, the meta-project that is going on is to figure out how to live day to day in a flexible and natural way while also staying relatively productive. I’m trying to figure out how to live, if you’re a nihilist and don’t believe that there’s any meaning to life.

Nihilism has been almost spiritual for me. There are times when I get low because I start identifying too strongly with my ego and I start judging my life. I start feeling like a failure and a loser. I am 41 years old, not married, not earning and spending my time working on a philosophy. Most people will think of that as a failure.

That’s where nihilism comes to my rescue. All of the reasons why we think we need to earn money and achieve success and even raise families, are based on faith-based views of the meaning of life. In reality, from the point of view of the universe, we’re just microscopic beings, on a grain of dust floating in a vast universe, that are only alive for a few micro-seconds. Most people find that image to be distressing, but I find it quite freeing.

Because life is meaningless, there is nothing we are supposed to do or that we must do in our lives. We can live in any way we want. There is no wrong answer. There is no way to do life wrong. Nobody is going to be there, after you die, who’ll be like, “You lived your life wrong. Sorry, but you’ve failed.“

We are all going to die one day. After a while, even the sun will die and the earth will be destroyed. By then, it won’t matter to anyone whether you crushed your soul at a low-paying job to raise multiple children from multiple partners, or whether you earned so much money and power that you literally became the King of the World. It won’t matter if your bloodline continued and you earned enough to ensure the survival of your great-grandchildren. Or if you chased drugs and sex and died of an overdose at age 21.

In reality, none of it matters, and that frees you up completely to live however you want to live. But this level of ultimate freedom can be scary and paralyzing in itself. If nothing matters, then how do we choose how to live?

My philosophy is not about telling you what you should choose. That is up to you. I will share what I’m choosing for myself, but not to say, “You should live this way too.” I will share it as an example of how you can live even if there’s no meaning to it all.

The important thing to remember is that even though objectively it doesn’t matter how you live; subjectively it matters a lot to you, how you choose to live. We are all just having an experience called life that will be over soon.

This experience is sometimes full of suffering and sometimes full of joy. You can’t avoid suffering completely, but how much unnecessary suffering you go through can depend on how you choose to live. What I know for sure is that the default ways of living in our present times, cause a lot of unnecessary suffering.

When you believe that it is important for you to earn money and spend money and be seen spending money, you increase unnecessary suffering. When you think that it is of utmost importance that you have children and they get better education and opportunities than you so that your bloodline can improve its social standing, generation to generation, that increases your unnecessary suffering. When you believe that you belong to a group that is oppressed and you must fight to gain power for your group; or that your group has power and you must fight to preserve that power, you increase suffering not just for your opponents but for yourself too.

Believing in meaning, increases suffering. Nihilism, is letting go.

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