This article is transcribed from my voice notes and edited in the car on the way to the beach so enjoy xoxo
According to The Anthropocene Reviewed, teenage John Green was consumed with the false certainty of nihilism. He looked down on people and thought it was stupid that they ascribed meaning to their lives.
People who dare to live by the idea that life has meaning are sometimes thought to be naive. There’s this idea that ascribing meaning to life is simply telling yourself a lie so you can better grapple with life in all its absurdity, complexity, and meaninglessness. So many philosophers exhaust themselves naming such frameworks to us, only for it to be in vain—because for whatever reason, we are driven toward a meaningful existence.
From observation, the ascription of meaning is, to some people, a rejection of the meaninglessness of life. It’s like they’re personally affronted on behalf of Nietzsche. Unsurprisingly, I think that attitude is a gross (but common) oversimplification of his ideas, and I’m sick of people stopping at pessimism when it comes to the adoption of nihilism. They’re using it as an excuse to complain.
Objectively, the facts are true. It’s what de Beauvoir calls the ambiguity of existence; it’s Camus’s “the absurd.” It’s the understanding of the disinterestedness of nature and the universe in humanity as a whole. Ambiguity, absurdity—whatever you want to call it—is difficult to deal with, for sure. I won’t discount how emotionally difficult it might be to contend with this idea when it first really hits you.
In the face of such emotion, we certainly do ascribe meaning. Science and every theoretical system we’ve come up with to describe the world are, in fact, frameworks through which we consume and make sense of our reality. Religion, social systems, cultures, every mark we leave on the planet—everything we do, even for our abject survival: eating, hunting, and fighting—are ways of ascribing meaning. Because for some reason, life is meaningful to us. Survival on this planet is preferable to whatever comes in death. Here, we can create something, and we yearn to do so.
Why do we even want to survive (or thrive) as a species? What does that mean, and why is our survival something to fight for? It must mean something to us in a fundamental sense. Even base instincts and desires—apart from art and things less directly attached to survival—everything we do has meaning. Everything we do shows the fact that we ascribe meaning to things.
I consider myself somewhat of a nihilist (it feels like a safe mode of thought, practically). But I don’t like the tone nihilists use when they talk about the false ascription of meaning to life. It’s negative, like they’re chewing and spitting out their words—saying things like “ascribing meaning is a lie,” etc.—as if the actual act of assigning meaning to life is, in fact, meaningless. Nihilism is a framework, by the way—and clinging to it is meaningful.
Nihilists will say, “This is a lie you tell yourself”—but it’s a lie we can’t break out of, and we shouldn’t want to. We have this push toward life. Why do we want to survive? Why do we want to succeed, to create, to relate to each other? What does any of it matter in an absurd universe?
We are not capable of acting in meaningless ways—even killing yourself (see: the other article) has meaning. It implicates something about your life. It’s intentional. The human species is not capable of living or dying without meaning. This is true because there is literally no person on this planet or in the entire human race who hasn’t ascribed meaning to their lives. The very act of survival is meaning.
It’s not bad to ascribe meaning to life.
The fact that we intentionally place meaning—or create it—is self-justifying. As Beauvoir says, “existence justifies itself.” We exist, and that is reason enough to exist. Just as our existence justifies itself, our tendency or need to ascribe meaning or to justify survival—the act of doing so—should not be criticized. The act of “lying to ourselves” about what reality really is, or digesting a simpler truth about reality, or altering it a little bit for meaning’s sake, is meaningful as we do it.
Ascribing meaning has meaning. Ascribing meaning justifies itself intrinsically. It feels inherently powerful.
The dragon chases its own tail, finding purpose in pursuing itself. And that’s not a flaw—it’s the point.
xxx
I never want to write or say the word ‘meaning’ ever again, my brain hurts