How to Climb Out of the Nihilism Swamp

Hey, have you ever come across the word "nihilism"?

Usually when we call someone a nihilist, we mean it as an insult. We are saying they lack ideals and drive, that they do not seem to care about anything, that they have no plans for the future.

But nihilism is really more like a genre of literature and philosophy. On the philosophy side you have Nietzsche, the guy everyone quotes in their essays, and Heidegger, who sounds impossibly highbrow. On the literary side you have Dostoevsky, whose name is a mouthful, and Camus, who looks unbearably cool with a cigarette.

It seems profound, but the core idea is easy to grasp. It is simply this: the existence of the universe and of human beings carries no objective meaning or purpose, and no intrinsic value.

Nihilism is not a "mistake." We have to find the courage to admit the world's "objective emptiness" first, because only then can we truly start the search for our own "subjective meaning," and become sincere people, people with a capital P.

Today's recommendation is the music of Molchat Doma, a post-punk band from Belarus. It turned out to fit this essay's theme of nihilism surprisingly well, so if you like it, go look up the whole album and give it a listen.

One more thing. This piece is lightly adapted from my reading notes for an ideology and ethics class, and even after some edits, the preachy, chicken-soup-for-the-soul flavor is still a little too strong. Please bear with me.

Black Square on White, Kazimir Malevich, 1913

Ever since Nietzsche's thunderclap of a line, "God is dead," fell upon the world, no one has been able to stop asking: "If God is gone, can I just do whatever I want, however I want?" The "God" here does not refer only to the Christian God. It points at every moral code and ethical order, and in the context of ancient China it would be the doctrine of "the ruler a ruler, the subject a subject, the father a father, the son a son." If we treat this whole system of everyone-in-their-proper-place as "feudal dross" and tear it out all at once, so that mothers do not love their children, children do not honor their elders, love is not faithful, and government does not serve the people, then how are we supposed to find a foothold for our own lives? How do we answer that ancient cry, the question of why we live and why we die? What stands before every one of us now is, without a doubt, a world where the sense of meaning has gone missing.

I often feel that the most urgent and weighty problem facing young people in China is exactly this scarcity of a sense of meaning. They do not know what is worth living for, and they do not know what their past or present actions amount to. This is what produces the "hollow heart" of the younger generation. Young people of the information age, the children of the internet and of globalization, have somehow ended up in this position: on one side they build a "self," or you could say a persona, out of the things they consume, like the shows and films they love or the brands they favor; on the other side they are just as aware of how rotten and decadent consumerism is, and they cry out at the top of their lungs:

I don't want to die alone in failure

I don't want to keep living underground

The con of material things

Ants in a hurry

People with no culture don't grieve

You can see this knotted, self-contradicting quality everywhere in young people today. They will not do the grueling overtime grind, but they are not content to lie flat either; they want to go work at the grassroots, yet they cannot give up the comforts of a good life; they want to get into the elite companies and famous schools, yet they dread being crushed by the pressure of the rat race. Every "contradiction" on this list, if you unpacked it, would be one of those hot-button issues society argues over endlessly without ever resolving. But across all these debates you can spot something they share. The younger generation is caught in a storm of ideas and opinions, unable to find where it belongs in the world, and so it drifts and wavers.

In this era, the problem we face is not "too little information" but "too much." When a major decision in life looms, we keep wishing for a "guide," someone who can tell us how to prepare, what to do, what goals to set.

In earlier times, the problem was a shortage of guides. There was no internet, and the exchange of information was limited. Now we face the opposite, an explosion of it. Whether it is a life choice, a career plan, or the more abstract work of shaping our values and our view of the world, both daily life and the internet send us an endless stream of advice. Under that flood, even if we are rational enough, even if we can think independently and critically, it is still very hard to make a decision we will not regret. We encounter many conflicting viewpoints, all of them well evidenced and persuasive, and so we run into "decision paralysis," the realization that we can never reach a rational decision through gathering and analyzing information. "Decision paralysis" is not merely a feeling of being lost, or trouble choosing. It is something deeper, the "impossibility of a good decision," which shows up as the certainty that no matter which path you pick in a major choice, you will regret it because of the other lives you gave up.

The worst case is when a young person, trapped in this bind, slides into a complete and negative nihilism, scorning all value and all meaning, deciding that human existence has no point and no purpose, and drowning in a whirlpool of self-denial and world-weariness. Since every choice leads to regret, "just don't choose" becomes the decision some people make. They "let it rot," they "lie flat," and young people who have given up on themselves use these extreme gestures to voice their helplessness and their rebellion against the world.

Stalker (film still), Andrei Tarkovsky, 1979

This "scarcity of meaning" and this "impossibility" are new problems, born of modern society, and they are the root of many of its troubles. Put into a concrete situation, they show up as the anxiety and the agonizing over choice that a young person feels when picking a career. This brings to mind a short piece by Marx, "Reflections of a Young Man on the Choice of a Profession." The essay is brief, but the flashes of thought from the young Marx still have something to teach us today.

In it, Marx works carefully through the many considerations and the inner conflict a young person faces when choosing a profession, laying bare the confusion, the tangled feelings, and the back-and-forth reflection that come with a major decision. As a young reader returning again and again to this essay more than a hundred years after it was written, I still feel, in my bones, the same knots Marx describes.

If you set aside the dense argument inside the text, the conclusion Marx reaches in "Reflections of a Young Man on the Choice of a Profession" is simple and clear: "to work for the common good of humanity," or in other words, "to labor for mankind." This is surely right, but as a guiding idea it is a little too abstract, so let me try to make it plainer for you.

Take two kinds of work. Teaching in poor villages, practicing medicine, lifting people out of poverty, building something new in science and technology, all of these stir us and draw us in, while speculation and resale, manipulating markets, hyping things up to sell them, leave us faintly dissatisfied, even a little disgusted. The moment we bring our gaze down to these specific jobs, we suddenly find that deep down we know perfectly well what is worth doing and what is not. So is there not something narrow and small-minded about going on and on insisting that "nothing has any meaning"? Nihilism looks eloquent, but it overlooks the common-sense judgments we make in ordinary life as real, existing people, and it overlooks the moral intuition that makes us human. That intuition needs no theory to prove it, and no law or ritual code to sort it into categories and set it down on paper.

Where does this moral intuition come from? It is precisely what Marx meant by "working for the common good of humanity." There is no need to pick at the words and ask, "but what exactly is this common good?", because we have already absorbed the answer without noticing, the way you absorb a thing by living near it.

History calls those men the greatest who have ennobled themselves by working for the common good; experience acclaims as happiest the man who has made the greatest number of people happy; religion itself teaches us that the ideal being whom all strive to copy sacrificed himself for the sake of mankind, and who would dare to contradict such judgments?

"Reflections of a Young Man on the Choice of a Profession," Karl Marx

So do not ask "is God dead?" and do not ask "does eternal value exist?" Pour your life into the common good of humanity, into laboring for the welfare of the great majority, into working for mankind, and a sense of meaning will come from there. The fulfillment of personal value and a commitment to the collective were never opposites. They are in fact the same thing: a person's value is realized in working for humanity, and working for humanity is the noblest and best way to express that value.

We need no religion and no pile of empty slogans to give our lives a foothold, because "serving the common good of humanity" is enough to fill the heart. We will, of our own accord, choose the work that serves others with a feeling of pride and a sense of something higher, and we will treat that work as our place in the world and as the meaning and purpose of our existence. What we should do is not daydream about so-called "value," "performance," or "profit," but first throw ourselves into one concrete thing after another, and let the meaning of life reveal itself in the doing. Hold on to that, and the particular profession you end up in turns out not to matter much at all.

I would like to borrow the final passage of Marx's essay as the close of my own, in the spirit of mutual encouragement:

If we have chosen the position in life in which we can most of all work for mankind, no burdens can bow us down, because they are sacrifices for the benefit of all; then we shall experience no petty, limited, selfish joy, but our happiness will belong to millions, our deeds will live on quietly but perpetually at work, and over our ashes will be shed the hot tears of noble people.

"Reflections of a Young Man on the Choice of a Profession," Karl Marx

Beat the Whites with the Red Wedge, El Lissitzky, 1920

I am Sea of Tranquility, and thank you for reading to the end.