The last two posts have been talking about nihilism as almost a cure to the pressures of life. Continuing along the same line, one consequence of life being meaningless is that you can’t do life wrong. There is no way to fail in life.

We are all just living beings, experiencing life in the universe for a short while. There is nothing really that you have to do. No matter what experience you end up having, that’s just the experience that you had. There is no success condition or failure condition to your experience.

This, at least to me, feels immensely peaceful. Whatever emotions or thoughts you are clinging on to; whatever load you’ve been carrying; whatever feels immensely meaningful to you but causes you suffering; you can let it go. It doesn’t matter. Do your best and forget about the result. Or don’t do your best and forget about the result. Or burn yourself from both ends, caring too much about the result. None of it matters in an objective sense, to the universe or whatever.

However you choose to live, you will still end up having just an experience of life, just like everyone else.

Of course, this doesn’t solve all of our problems completely because how we live still matters subjectively to us. Since we are the ones having this experience, it matters to us, more than anyone else, what kind of experience we have. In the end, objectively, it won’t matter what we did, after we’re dead. But during our lives, it matters a lot to us that we have an experience that we want to have.

This is where subjective meaning, goals, purpose etc. come in. Since everyone is different, they’re free to choose however they want to live. I think the most frustrating thing that people feel in this regard is when they can’t live the way they want to live; for whatever reason. It’s not even about ‘the good life’ or ‘the best life’; people just want to have agency and want to choose how they should live. When they can’t make that choice, or can’t live the way they want to live, that’s when life feels like a chore. And that causes a lot of suffering.

I’ve developed some solutions to this problem and I hope to share these through my philosophy. But for now, I think just reminding ourselves of the objective point of view from time to time can help us release a lot of stress and prevent us from getting too caught up in the illusion or maya of the human world.

So relax, take a deep breath and just chill. You’re not doing life wrong.

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Photo by Mohamed Nohassi on Unsplash