Rational Nihilism

Rational Nihilism is the philosophy I’m developing. Here is a short introduction to it.

Introduction

It begins with the idea that objectively speaking life is meaningless. It asks the question: instead of having a crisis about it, can we find a way to live anyway?

Irrespective of what answer we might find, the first step is to accept the fact that life is meaningless. We should not hide from this fact or run back to faith or try to recast some kind of illusion that we can believe in. This is because faith based systems lead to conflict, animosity, hatred, war and just generally, much ado about nothing.

Enlightenment to Nihilism

I believe that the enlightenment, as a stage in human development, hasn’t finished yet. Humans created faith based systems to manage their complex world. This is completely understandable for a species using emergent intelligence to bootstrap itself out of the animal world and into the world of civilization and technology.

Eventually though, humans figured out how to use reason to move beyond stories and faith and gain a better understanding of the actual reality of the world. We applied it first to the physical world and got the natural sciences. We’re in the process of applying it to the human world and are currently developing social sciences.

Sooner or later, we were going to apply it to our faith based systems and realize that god doesn’t exist. God didn’t create us, we created him. And that would inevitably lead us to the void of nihilism. This has happened already and we’re at the back end of our initial response.

Just as understandably, our initial response was that of fear, uncertainty, anger, denial, depression etc. Humanity is basically going through the stages of grief at the death of god. But eventually we have to reach acceptance.

The Possibility Space of Nihilism

Rational Nihilism is my attempt at accepting the inevitable truth and moving on. I don’t see nihilism as an endless abyss.

“The Construct” in the movie The Matrix, was a loading program that was used to train and arm people before entering the matrix. It was shown as an endless white space without any walls, ceiling or floor.

That’s how I imagine the void of nihilism looks like, once you enter it. It might look like a blackhole from the outside but from inside it’s a whitehole, if you will. An endless possibility space, free from all old dogma and restrictions, where we can build something new.

This isn’t a postmodern project of deconstruction. It is a post-postmodern reconstruction project. It is not something mystical or abstract. It is an engineering project to build a new conceptual landscape. I’m not interested in debating words, their definitions, or play language games that tie people up in knots so convoluted it would make a Japanese bondage artist blush. I’m interested in using philosophy to figure out how to live in a post-faith world. Which brings us to the next section.

What I Mean by Philosophy

The word philosophy itself can mean various things to various people. Here I’ll explain what I mean by it. This is not an attempt at forcing my definition on the world. I’m just defining my terms so you’ll understand what I’m talking about.

Philosophy as a Noun

Philosophy as a noun, to me, means a collection of ideas, thoughts, beliefs, concepts etc. that may or may not be coherent. For example, objectivism is a philosophy given by Ayn Rand, or Platonism is the philosophy began by Plato and developed further by his followers.

Of course, Philosophy can also mean the subject of philosophy itself. Philosophy can also be attached to words to mean a collection of ideas under a specific topic, like Business Philosophy or Life Philosophy.

Philosophy as a Verb

In the verb form, to do philosophy, or to philosophize, to me, means to start with doubt and use the human faculty of reason to try and understand stuff. For me, doubt and reason, are the two distinguishing features of philosophy, the verb.

This might not sit well with some readers and I might be accused of diminishing other forms of sense-making. I want to assure you that I do not have any such intentions. There are many ways of making sense of the world and seeking wisdom. Religious practice, spirituality, art, music, literature, devotional faith, psychedelic experiences, etc. are all such ways. I do not intend to diminish any of them. I only intend to clearly define what I mean by philosophy.

For me, to do philosophy is to say, “I can’t really trust old religions or spiritual gurus or intellectuals. So I’m going to figure this out using my own head, and nothing else.” You can still engage with the ideas of others but you refuse to believe anything as a matter of faith.

For me, there is no “studying philosophy” without “doing philosophy”. If you only study philosophy then you’re a scholar or historian of philosophy but not a philosopher.

Also, for me, philosophers who don’t present their arguments clearly, are literary figures, rather than philosophers. Their works are great pieces of non-fiction literature and can lead people to wisdom, like any other literature, but it’s not philosophy.

Philosophy as a Tool

The last element of philosophy, at least good philosophy, that is key to my project is practical utility.

The reason humans started doing philosophy was because they weren’t satisfied with the answers the faith of their time and place provided them. They weren’t happy with the lives they lived and the society in which they found themselves. Just like many of us today. And so some of them took it upon themselves to figure it all out on their own, using their own brain.

They wanted to understand what the world is and how to live in it. That was the original purpose of philosophy. Recent academic philosophy seems to have forgotten that purpose. My project is closer to the earliest philosophers of ancient India or Greece than to contemporary academic philosophy.

Rational Nihilism Summarized

Rational Nihilism accepts that life has no inherent meaning — and treats that not as a tragedy but as freedom. It’s about building systems that work without pretending they’re sacred.

Usually, nihilism is used synonymously with nothingness and it is assumed that if anyone was to build anything, it won’t be nihilism anymore because there will be something, instead of nothing. The reason I call it nihilism is because whatever we build, has to always remain lucid of the fact that life is meaningless.

We have a natural tendency to smuggle meaning in somehow. If we build something faith based again, no matter how new it is, it will face the same issues as all the other philosophies based on faith and we’ll stay stuck in the mourning stage of our collective grief. If we want to
move forward to the next stage of human evolution, we have to find systems that work without meaning.

To go any deeper into what I mean or how I’ve managed to do this right here on the philosophy home page won’t be appropriate. As I develop the philosophy, I’ll add links to essays that will go into the whole of it in more detail. For now, here’s a little taste of rational nihilism.

What Have I Figured Out So Far?

One key tenet of my project is that the philosophy must be tested in my own life before sharing. If it makes my life better, then there must be something right about it. That is more important to me than to be “right” or “true”. So here’s a very short view of what a nihilist philosophy might look like.

Why Bother?

Life is objectively meaningless. There is no god. There is no grand purpose for your life or for humanity. So why live at all? That’s the question many philosophers have asked. Some go as far as to say that man cannot live without meaning.

Yes, we all have encountered such scenarios where a man collapses suddenly, unable to breath, his face turning grey. The paramedics arrive and say, “This man is all out of meaning! Be Quick! Give me 10cc of Kierkegaard, STAT!“

Of course, I’m being facetious. That has never happened. So it’s not true that man cannot live without meaning. Perhaps what they mean is that man cannot live well without meaning.

And the problem starts with this idea of “why bother?” If everything is meaningless, then why bother with anything? Why go to work? Why get married? Why do anything at all?

Because We Can’t Not

“Alright“, I say, “Try doing nothing for as long as possible.” Even the most pessimistic depressed “nihilists” (I put nihilists in quotes here because I’m using it in the traditional derogatory sense,) will eventually get up and eat something when they’re hungry.

We are animals. Our bodies are biological machines. They have some basic needs and when they aren’t met, our bodies have ways to make us take the actions that will meet those needs.

And if you allow that we have to meet our basic needs, other things related to living life as a human enter the picture. Even something as simple as meeting the need for food requires us to participate in society. We all create value for the world which we exchange for the value that we need and want from the world. So we have to work and earn money and interact with society.

There’s no one who, in solidarity with the meaning that has been lost, can choose to not bother to continue living. Since we have to live anyway, meaning or no meaning, the question then becomes how do we live well without it?

I won’t say I’ve found all the answers but here’s what I’ve learned so far.

Smart Hedonism

Nihilism is often blamed for leading people to mindless hedonism. If life is meaningless and we must live, then we might as well pursue pleasure over everything else. This makes sense, if your intent is to strawman nihilism by applying it in the most mindless way.

We all know by now that pursuing pleasure mindlessly in every moment, doesn’t lead to sustainable pleasure. We understand how the hedonic treadmill works. Even the Epicureans of Ancient Greece understood that maximizing pleasure in the long run is quite different from pursuing it in the short term.

So, yes, I do believe it makes sense to want to seek pleasure as much as you can in the long term, but the actual way to do that requires juxtaposing restraint and discipline with indulgence and fun. You can find your own balance between the two but I’ve found that the longer you can restrain yourself, the greater the pleasure of finally indulging in whatever you enjoy.

Optimize Suffering

Instead of minimizing all suffering, we can again use our brain and see that there’s unnecessary suffering, like depression, and necessary suffering, like working out in the gym.

The idea is to minimize unnecessary suffering and not just accept but seek out the kind of necessary suffering that leads to growth.

Sleep Is Important

I cannot stop singing praises of sleep and how important it is for us. There’s nothing our society has gotten more wrong than disrespecting our sleep and body clock.

Yes, you might end up spending a third of your life sleeping, but it will improve the quality of the remaining two third of your life and it might even increase the overall length of your life.

To regulate sleep, you have to think about light exposure. Your body needs exposure to morning light to set the body clock. And you have to stop confusing your body by exposing it to blue light (florescent light, screens) after sunset.

Other than that we just need to relearn the skill of telling our mind to shut off and go to sleep and allow a natural sleep rhythm to form, (which might include some hours in the middle of the night being awake.)

Attention is Everything

People often say that time is your most precious commodity. But actually, time is not yours at all. It ticks away no matter what you do.

The most precious commodity that you have is your attention. (BTW Thank you for giving it to me right now!) If there was only a single thing that people could retain from my philosophy, I’d want it to be the importance of attention.

Here’s some things I’ve learned about attention:

• If you want to do anything well, (do well in studies, do a good job,) you have to pay attention to that thing. The more and longer you can focus, the better you’ll get at it.
• If you want to learn something, a subject or a skill, you have to pay attention to it.
• If you want to improve your relationships, learn to pay attention to others.
• The mythical “flow state” everyone gushes over, is just the highest level of focused attention. You can achieve it in anything, although it’s easier to achieve in some things than others.
• Mental attention is linked to visual focus. You can force your mind to pay attention by focusing your eyes on the thing that you want to pay attention to. Whether that’s your coursebook or your significant other. If you can focus your eyes on it, your mind’s attention will follow. Every time we get distracted, it begins with our eyes either looking away or getting defocused.
• Social media sites are attention harvesting farms and you are the crops. They capture attention by offering connection or amusement — but mostly by hijacking your visual focus and dopamine system. They harvest your most precious commodity and sell it to advertisers. It’s daylight robbery and everyone is a willing participant!

These are the kind of end products that my philosophical project produces. I call them Philosophical Application Principals or PAPs; simple, testable ideas for living well without meaning. There’s a lot more I could share with you about this system but this is enough to whet your appetite.

Below you’ll find links to my philosophical essays and posts. This is a work in progress. Once I have enough essays, I hope to write a book that will be a more thorough introduction to rational nihilism.

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