A user's guide to overcoming nihilism
When your worldview collapses, it's easy to slip into hopelessness and despair. Here's how to claw your way out from someone who's been through it.
“If you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.”
-Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil
We live in an age of collapse. Most of what’s collapsing is physically, tangibly real: the collapse of global ecosystems and the climate, the slow and steady erosion of democratic norms, the collapse of original storytelling in Hollywood in favor of remakes, reboots, sequels, and prequels of established franchises, etc. But perhaps the most frightening collapse is the slow, wholesale destruction of our old philosophical worldviews by our changing understanding of reality.
Our entire lives are built around our beliefs. The things we spend our waking (and often, sleeping) minutes on are the things we believe are valuable and worthy of our time and attention. These beliefs are heavily influenced by our overarching worldview — it is the engine that keeps our lives moving.
But western civilization’s guiding philosophies for the past several hundred years are no longer particularly good at helping us deal with modern reality. Eternal-growth capitalism may have been an easy thing for a white, affluent male to believe in back in the postwar-economic boom of the 1950s, but now, as the planet buckles under the weight of 200 years of that economic system, it is a much harder philosophy for a reasonable person to subscribe to. The same goes for Christianity, which a mere 170 years ago didn’t need to incorporate the discoveries of people like Darwin, Einstein, Niels Bohr, or Edward Lorenz into their conception of truth.
Some people are simply too invested in these worldviews to let them fall apart, so instead, they address the holes in their beliefs either by ignoring them, rejecting truth as a whole and retreating into fundamentalism, or by inventing complicated conspiracies. Climate change, these people argue, is a communist hoax. The decline in Christianity in the US is the result of an insidious campaign conducted by a Satanic, pedophilic, liberal cabal. Multiculturalism, if you’re a reader of the Daily Stormer (or the CEO of Twitter) is actually part of a global plot to commit white genocide.
Others — either because they are privileged enough to do so or critical enough in their thinking to be forced to — instead deconstruct their old worldviews until there is nothing left there to believe in. And when this happens, they are forced to confront a harsh truth: human beings don’t function well without systems of meaning.
It’s easy, in these moments, to slip into existential nihilism1. This is the belief that there is no fundamental purpose or meaning in life, that it is all pointless and absurd and possibly not even worth living. And down that road there be monsters.
It is possible to rebuild meaning and purpose after going through periods of nihilism, meaninglessness, and despair, and if you succeed, your life will almost certainly be better for the effort. While there is no one route out of nihilism, I can give some tips.
Note: Working through nihilism can force you to confront some of the bleakest thoughts a human can have, so it’s understandable if you’ve gotten to a really dark place. If you have: Lifeline provides 24-hour, confidential support to anyone in suicidal crisis or emotional distress. Call or text 988 to connect with a trained crisis counselor. Call 911 if you or someone you know is in immediate danger or go to the nearest emergency room.
1. Figure out which came first: the depression or the despair.
I hit the most depressed, nihilistic point of my life shortly after I moved from downtown Washington, DC to a suburb on the Jersey Shore. I was suddenly without my large network of friends, without access to a car, and working from home, so I interacted with virtually no one except my fiancee. I drank too much and exercised too little. I spent a lot of time on the internet.
It is, in retrospect, a little embarrassing that I didn’t connect the drastic shift of my worldview from what was essentially Vonnegut-style humanism to stare-into-the-void nihilism with my change in circumstances. But at the time, I didn’t fully appreciate the connection between our mind’s health and our body’s health (more on that revelation in the article linked below).
So if you’re feeling incredibly bleak about the world, the first thing I’d do is check out the conditions of your existence. Remember that all of the following things can contribute to depression and anxiety:
Lack of exercise
Lack of sunlight
Lack of sleep
Lack of social connection
Loneliness
Physical traumas (including childbirth)
Emotional traumas (breakups, deaths of someone close, major life changes)
Unprocessed childhood traumas
Toxic relationships
Lack of hydration
Poor diet
Alcohol use
Drug use
Excessive time online/social media (a.k.a. “doomscrolling”)
Just existing in a late capitalist hellscape
Some of these conditions may be impossible to fix, but others might just require minor lifestyle tweaks. You don’t have to go to a gym to get more exercise and fresh air — just go for a walk, there is tons of research showing that merely being around trees can help your mental health.
This does not mean the stuff you are struggling with isn’t real. But our thoughts follow our moods, and there are simple physiological ways we can boost mood. If you’re thinking stuff like, “life is a meaningless meatgrinder” it can sound true if you’re living in misery and squalor. It does not sound true if there’s stuff you actually enjoy in your life. So give your mood a boost by drinking more water, meditating, or doing some light yoga. And hey: if you can afford it, get into therapy.
2. Find meaning.
You aren’t going to function without some form of meaning in your life, so it’s important that you find something to live for. Fortunately, that can be literally anything.
The most famous essay on the topic of fighting for meaning is Albert Camus’ The Myth of Sisyphus. In this, he uses the character of Sisyphus from the Greek myth to try and picture the most meaningless life possible. In the original story, Sisyphus offended the gods and was condemned to push a rock up a hill for all eternity, only to have it roll back down to the bottom right before he made it to the top. The full essay (linked above) is essential reading to one struggling with the absurdity of a meaningless existence, but the trick, in short, is that Camus finds meaning within meaninglessness. By accepting that life is meaningless and choosing to fight on anyway, he is sticking a finger in the eye of a universe which wishes to tear him down.
Camus doesn’t do it for everyone, of course — not all of us have his dashing French Resistance fighter temperament to rage against the dying of the light — but his overall point is a vital one: meaning does not need to come from a god, or the universe as a whole. It can come from within, by accepting our reality and choosing to fight for something better anyway.
During my struggle with nihilism, I found a therapist who focused on Viktor Frankl’s2 logotherapy methods. Frankl was a Jewish Austrian psychiatrist who survived Auschwitz, and during his time there, became interested in what helped people to survive the horrors of the Holocaust. He survived himself, and developed logotherapy, a form of existential psychological analysis that helps people find meaning in life. His book, Man’s Search for Meaning, became influential in postwar psychology, and is still worth a read today.
In a material sense, finding what matters to you is relatively simple: who and what do you love? What topics and work do you find interesting? Invest time and energy into those. For me, what got me through the darker parts were my family, friends, good music, and good books. Once I focused more of my energy on those things, other meaningful things began to crop up naturally on their own, and I was able to start cobbling something new together.
3. Find philosophical alternatives.
The best news I can give you is this: while western civilization’s philosophies are breaking under the weight of the reality they created, other worldviews are doing just fine. Since the 1950s, eastern religion and philosophy has made serious inroads in the west, and while there are plenty of New Age pseudoscientific backroads you can find yourself going down in your exploration of these worldviews, there’s also a lot of good.
The lowest hanging fruit for you here is Buddhism. As a religion, Buddhism was founded by a man going through an existential crisis. Siddhartha Gautama was a privileged prince who renounced his belongings upon first coming into contact with the world’s suffering. After a time of intense meditation, he became “enlightened” (the title “Buddha” means “enlightened one”) and created the philosophy that would form the basis for Buddhism. And unlike Christianity, much of the core tenets of Buddhism has aged spectacularly well: neuroscientists keep finding that many of the Buddha’s core insights are true.
For my money, the best writer to introduce westerners to eastern religions is the late Alan Watts. His book on the core beliefs of Vedanta, a school of Hinduism, titled simply The Book, is a trippy wonder that will have you asking yourself totally different questions about existence and its meaning at the end of it. For those who aren’t inclined to read, Watts’ talks are all over the place online and on YouTube — he was an exciting and lucid speaker — but I would most recommend that you download the video game Everything. It is a game in which you can play literally everything in the Universe — from an atom to a dust mite to a planet to a galaxy — and the play is interspersed with audio clips of Watts’ teachings.
Buddhism is a heady religion, though, so some people might prefer instead to go for the simpler philosophy of Taoism, which resembles, in some respects, western stoicism in its simplicity and its reverence for the laws of nature. The good news there is that the holy book of Taoism, the Tao Te Ching, is about the shortest holy book out there.
Eastern religions also mesh particularly well with the work of the psychedelic authors, people like Timothy Leary, Robert Anton Wilson, Aldous Huxley, and Alan Moore. Leary’s colleague at Harvard before they were both expelled, Richard Alpert, even left behind the world of LSD and mushrooms to become the Buddhist monk known as Ram Dass.
Eastern religion aside, the field of indigenous American philosophy is also particularly exciting of late: the Potawatomi ecologist Robin Wall Kimmerer wrote a book, Braiding Sweetgrass, that is a philosophical look at how we can mesh Native American understandings of nature and myth to rebuild a connection with the earth we’ve destroyed. This is part of a much larger movement in indigenous communities to reposition humans as caretakers of the earth, rather than dominators of it. Outside of indigenous circles, movements like witchcraft and neopaganism have developed ideologies that re-center nature, viewing humans as part of a web, rather than as the top of a pyramid.
Western philosophy is not hopeless either: we have our own philosophies that thrive in times of upheaval or chaos, including stoicism and the delightfully bonkers religion of Discordianism:
Book Rex: Philosophies for Chaotic Times
There’s a lovely moment in the play Hamlet where the title character tells his friends that he has sworn an oath of vengeance to a ghost, and he will now be feigning insanity in order to get to the bottom of the ghost’s claims. His friends, Marcellus and Horatio, are understandably taken aback.
Discordianism is what I’ve personally gone with: it acknowledges that human brains might not be capable of fully comprehending the universe, and as such, aren’t capable of building a 100% “correct” ideology. Instead, it argues we should treat ideologies and worldviews as tools that can be picked up as needed, and dropped when finished. I love this because it allows me to play with every worldview, without ever taking any one of them too seriously.
Next steps
Once you have the scaffolding of a basic philosophy or belief system under you, once you’ve identified what brings your life meaning and have learned ways to boost your attitude on a day-to-day basis, then all that really remains is to explore, learn, and live life. Finding meaning and purpose in life, is not, in my experience, a matter of stumbling across the correct answer and having the problem fully solved. It is a practice and a mindset that needs to be reinforced and cared for.
The good news is that the process of doing this can be fun. You learn to enjoy the journey rather than fixating on the destination, and you can make space for exploration, for relaxation, and for good old fashioned messing around. In the words of the great Kurt Vonnegut:
“I tell you, we are here on earth to fart around, and don’t let anyone tell you any different.”
How have you managed to fight nihilism? What philosophies or thoughts have been helpful for you? Share in the comments below!
To be clear: Existential nihilism is just one form of nihilism. Etymologically, nihilism is derived from the Latin root word nihil, which means “nothing.” As a term, nihilism has been applied to any movement that rejects or undermines established moral, scientific, or political truths. That in itself isn’t a bad thing; indeed, it is vital to the functioning of science that established truths be questioned always. It is also vital that moral truths be questioned and examined so we don’t, just off the top of my head, condemn everyone with a non-hetero sexual orientation to death because of a thousand year old Bible Verse.
There are nihilists who have turned meaningless into its own meaning, a sort of “everything’s pointless, so let’s just be cool to each other and have fun.” That type of nihilism is not something I would ever wish to fight against.
Frankl himself is a problematic character, as he may have collaborated with the fascists to some extent. Some see his work in the context of the Holocaust as a form of victim blaming.
The existentialist approach has always made sense to me since reading Sartre way back in college. Also Buddhism, which surprisingly overlaps with existentialism very well, especially in Stephen Batchelor’s Buddhism Without Beliefs. And Alan Watts was great, though I’ve only read bits of The Book. Glad to know about that video game, as that’s the main way I deal with existential despair (I know, I should probably meditate instead). More recently I’ve been watching this YouTube video series by John Vervaeke called The Crisis of Meaning. All of Western philosophy combined with a dollop of Buddhism. Its downside is that it’s an old-school lecture with lots of ums and ahs, which is maybe why I’m only a few episodes in.
Honestly, the idea of nihilism is comforting to me. The idea that nothing really matters is calming. It’s helped me be less stressed at work.
I do just enough to get my job done, but I know my silly little spreadsheet won’t exist 10, 20, 100 years from now so I don’t go nuts trying to make it anything more than it needs to be. I’m able to focus more on what makes me happy or is fulfilling right now since there’s no point living anywhere but in the present ¯\_(ツ)_/¯