Nihilism is a far-fetched fantasy.
This reality is the total opposite of meaningless. Every action you make and every moment of your life instrinsically has a colossal importance. Not only does every decision have a rippling effect that eventually spreads with some degree of influence across the entire globe, with occasional potential to produce substantial and visible change, but it’s also leaving a permanent imprint on your storyline. Each and every moment that is brought forth into existence gets captured into an immutable snapshot that will exist for eternity. Although the human mind can accurately understand only that which it is currently experiencing, the universe is quite the opposite and remembers absolutely everything from the dawn of time to the very end days. All the beautiful and all the ugly. Don’t let this idea spring forth a panicky impulse to carefully craft a perfect timeline, this would be a totally futile effort. Of course, we only really have power in the present moment and so we should only ever really be concerned with the present.
As humans, we’ve evolved some very unique tools for our minds that give us great advantages but also some real problems. One of these is a filter that sits in front of our consciousness, discarding of whatever sensory inputs, emotions, thoughts, sensations are deemed as unuseful noise. This allows us to avoid distraction and focus on creating intricate logical concepts that have led us to acquiring food in clever ways, forming language and building civilisation as we know it today, et cetera et cetera. However, it also leads us to throwing away many of the things that make the experience of life in this universe feel evokative, meaningful and fulfilling. The strength of our filters varies from person to person. On one hand you have eccentric mystics and schizophrenics who are just experiencing everything entering their mind with very little resistance, and then on the other side of things we see what cases of an excessively strong filter causes… depression.
The ability to conceptualise is a tool that is both a blessing and a burden. Again, we wouldn’t be able to create technology, communicate the way we do or survive as well as we have without being able to put things in mental boxes with labels. But this is also what causes us to irrationally discriminate, fail to see the infinte nuance and detail in situations and dismiss nourishing experiences as pointless because our minds decide there’s nothing worthwhile in it. These qualities are really prevalent in modern western society more than ever, and it’s suffocating us, leading us to become blind to and totally dismiss the immense opportunity of experiencing this life and flourishing within it.
It’s easy to come to the conclusion that these emotions and sensations and experiences are meaningless because they don’t result in any grand ultimatum. But this is a privileged thought process. If one was to be stranded without food for a couple of weeks, would they really be able to shrug off the idea of eating a proper meal as meaningless? If someone was being held over a fire, would it not be overwhelmingly blatant that getting away from the scorching heat is an immensely important action in that moment? And when our consciousness is less tamed (when our filter is less overwhelming), when we are young children and when we dream during sleep, do we really feel that existence is empty? On your deathbed, how are you going to feel about all of the experiences you created in your time?
