# Can you fight Nihilism? **URL:** \ **Category:** In My Humble Opinion\ **Created:** [March 16, 2020, 3:27am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/can-you-fight-nihilism/849561 "2020-03-16T03:27:04Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 4
**Author:** ![Darren\_Garrison](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/darren_garrison/32/92_2.png) [@Darren\_Garrison](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Darren_Garrison)\ **Post date:** [March 18, 2020, 3:55pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/can-you-fight-nihilism/849561/61 "2020-03-18T15:55:01Z")
> [@Inigo\_Montoya](#): > > BUT, isn’t all of that rather liberating? Everything you can imagine is on the table if you’re brave enough to truly believe nothing matters. Your actions don’t matter, the consequences to you and everyone else don’t matter. See to your comfort as you will, because yours is the only comfort that truly matters. Ya know, this makes me realize–Machinaforce would have made a really boring protagonist in _Groundhog’s Day_. ---
**Author:** ![begbert2](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/begbert2/32/3357_2.png) [@begbert2](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/begbert2)\ **Post date:** [March 18, 2020, 6:53pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/can-you-fight-nihilism/849561/62 "2020-03-18T18:53:51Z")
> [@Machinaforce](#): > > Actually there is no personal meaning that is still a dodge and not a logical endpoint to resolve nihilism. Personal meaning is an illusion we drape over nihilism to avoid dealing with it. The comic misses the point entirely. > > > [@](#): > > > > The point of writing such a book is to clarify a dilemma. On one hand, there are plenty of people prepared to embrace living without a point: living is warranted by the accumulation of interesting or pleasurable experiences. On the other hand, there are people who maintain that there are reasons for living, which are ethical, cognitive, political, or a combination of all three. My point was that in the former case the warrant is not rational, because it boils down to the valorization of sensation, and this requires the sacrifice reason; while in the latter case, the credibility of the reasons invoked is increasingly undermined by methods of explanation in the natural sciences, whose explanatory comprehensiveness renders appeals to meaning, purpose, and value redundant. > > The point of the book was to point out the full extent of this aporia and to suggest that those who claim to have overcome it, whether by cheerfully embracing purposelessness or resolutely maintaining the irreducibility of value, cannot provide philosophically convincing grounds for doing. > > Of course, the intelligibility of this aporia is supposed to point to the way in which thinking can make sense of the absence of sense, and in this regard the book not only endorses philosophical rationality but seeks to defend it. > > The point of charting the full extent of the aporia is to try and generate the resources for overcoming it without relapsing into either of the two unsatisfactory alternatives mentioned above. This is what I have been trying to do since writing that book over fifteen years ago and I am now working on a second book which I hope points beyond the deadlock described in the first. > > If I thought that everything was really pointless I wouldn’t have bothered writing a book about it: the pointlessness of pointing out pointlessness is self-evident. But I don’t think everything is pointless. My conviction is that purpose is generated by us; not through existential choice or commitment, but through collective ways of thinking and talking rooted in our social practices. Purpose can’t be individually selected, it can only be forged collectively. But doing so requires cognitive and political resources which are currently lacking and which must also be produced. You keep asserting that there is no personal meaning and that personal meaning is an illusion we drape over nihilism to avoid dealing with it, but that’s completely wrong according to the block of text you quoted. That text explicitly acknowledges from its first sentences that people can and do conclude that living is warranted by the accumulation of interesting or pleasurable experiences. He then asserts that this is “not rational, because it boils down to the valorization of sensation”, but he doesn’t actually give a reason why sensation shouldn’t be “valorized” - and he _certainly_ doesn’t make an argument that sensations are illusions - at least not in the quoted text. Essentially, what you have here is some dipwad acknowledging that hedonism is indeed a way of justifying existence, but then saying he doesn’t _like_ that and thus is going to ignore it. He’s apparently doing this because with hedonism around nobody would bother with his back-assward alternate way of generating purpose from collective social practice that he’s trying to argue for, to justify anybody listening to him. (And I note that you’re also ignoring his approach, preferring to stop at nihilism and wallow in it.) Suffice to say, this dude’s sophistry is not impressive or compelling. He can _dislike_ living for the joy of living all he wants, but that doesn’t mean it’s not happening, and it doesn’t mean he’s proven it isn’t happening. ---
**Author:** ![QuickSilver](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/quicksilver/32/7832_2.png) [@QuickSilver](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/QuickSilver)\ **Post date:** [March 18, 2020, 7:13pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/can-you-fight-nihilism/849561/63 "2020-03-18T19:13:06Z")
> [@begbert2](#): > > You keep asserting that there is no personal meaning and that personal meaning is an illusion we drape over nihilism to avoid dealing with it, but that’s completely wrong according to the block of text you quoted. That text explicitly acknowledges from its first sentences that people can and do conclude that living is warranted by the accumulation of interesting or pleasurable experiences. He then asserts that this is “not rational, because it boils down to the valorization of sensation”, but he doesn’t actually give a reason why sensation shouldn’t be “valorized” - and he _certainly_ doesn’t make an argument that sensations are illusions - at least not in the quoted text. > > Essentially, what you have here is some dipwad acknowledging that hedonism is indeed a way of justifying existence, but then saying he doesn’t _like_ that and thus is going to ignore it. He’s apparently doing this because with hedonism around nobody would bother with his back-assward alternate way of generating purpose from collective social practice that he’s trying to argue for, to justify anybody listening to him. (And I note that you’re also ignoring his approach, preferring to stop at nihilism and wallow in it.) > > Suffice to say, this dude’s sophistry is not impressive or compelling. He can _dislike_ living for the joy of living all he wants, but that doesn’t mean it’s not happening, and it doesn’t mean he’s proven it isn’t happening. \ Now look here you suffering miserable bastards! You’re going to take the life you’re given and you’ll fucking well enjoy it, or it’s going to feel a lot longer than there really is. And there’ll be no more where this comes from,! You hear me?! So stop your whining. Is that perfectly clear?\ ---
**Author:** ![Inigo\_Montoya](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/inigo_montoya/32/124_2.png) [@Inigo\_Montoya](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Inigo_Montoya)\ **Post date:** [March 18, 2020, 7:34pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/can-you-fight-nihilism/849561/64 "2020-03-18T19:34:59Z")
What bout pointed sticks? ---
**Author:** ![QuickSilver](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/quicksilver/32/7832_2.png) [@QuickSilver](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/QuickSilver)\ **Post date:** [March 18, 2020, 8:34pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/can-you-fight-nihilism/849561/65 "2020-03-18T20:34:02Z")
Heh. ---
**Author:** ![Machinaforce](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/aeb1de/32.png) [@Machinaforce](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Machinaforce)\ **Post date:** [March 18, 2020, 9:11pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/can-you-fight-nihilism/849561/66 "2020-03-18T21:11:51Z")
> [@Mijin](#): > > Huh? The comic spends almost all of its three panels completely agreeing that life is meaningless, and never says anything contrary to that. What did you want? The last panel to just say “fin”? > > The point of the comic is not to deflect, it’s essentially to say “So what?”. So what if nihilism’s true? Why should I dwell over nihilism any more than I dwell over the melting point of lead? > Thinking about how life is pointless is pointless. Because it still acts as though life has meaning hence him climbing the tree, because he sees value in that. The comic isn’t embracing nihilism, it’s still deflecting from the major point. ---
**Author:** ![Machinaforce](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/aeb1de/32.png) [@Machinaforce](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Machinaforce)\ **Post date:** [March 18, 2020, 9:13pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/can-you-fight-nihilism/849561/67 "2020-03-18T21:13:57Z")
> [@begbert2](#): > > You keep asserting that there is no personal meaning and that personal meaning is an illusion we drape over nihilism to avoid dealing with it, but that’s completely wrong according to the block of text you quoted. That text explicitly acknowledges from its first sentences that people can and do conclude that living is warranted by the accumulation of interesting or pleasurable experiences. He then asserts that this is “not rational, because it boils down to the valorization of sensation”, but he doesn’t actually give a reason why sensation shouldn’t be “valorized” - and he _certainly_ doesn’t make an argument that sensations are illusions - at least not in the quoted text. > > Essentially, what you have here is some dipwad acknowledging that hedonism is indeed a way of justifying existence, but then saying he doesn’t _like_ that and thus is going to ignore it. He’s apparently doing this because with hedonism around nobody would bother with his back-assward alternate way of generating purpose from collective social practice that he’s trying to argue for, to justify anybody listening to him. (And I note that you’re also ignoring his approach, preferring to stop at nihilism and wallow in it.) > > Suffice to say, this dude’s sophistry is not impressive or compelling. He can _dislike_ living for the joy of living all he wants, but that doesn’t mean it’s not happening, and it doesn’t mean he’s proven it isn’t happening. His book essentially proves it. The such ways of dealing with nihilism are not valid. ---
**Author:** ![begbert2](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/begbert2/32/3357_2.png) [@begbert2](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/begbert2)\ **Post date:** [March 18, 2020, 9:17pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/can-you-fight-nihilism/849561/68 "2020-03-18T21:17:30Z")
> [@Machinaforce](#): > > His book essentially proves it. The such ways of dealing with nihilism are not valid. I don’t believe that for a single second. Keep in mind that you are explicitly arguing that the sense of taste doesn’t exist, or that it’s not “valid” to prefer eating food rather than fecal matter. ---
**Author:** ![The\_Other\_Waldo\_Pepper](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/the_other_waldo_pepper/32/12370_2.png) [@The\_Other\_Waldo\_Pepper](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/The_Other_Waldo_Pepper)\ **Post date:** [March 18, 2020, 9:59pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/can-you-fight-nihilism/849561/69 "2020-03-18T21:59:47Z")
> [@Machinaforce](#): > > His book essentially proves it. The such ways of dealing with nihilism are not valid. Again, you keep saying stuff like this: that something isn’t _valid,_ or that something _would be wrong_ — almost as if, and stay with me for a moment here, you think you have a meaningful and important way of gauging _validity_, or of making evaluations in terms of _rightness and wrongness_. So, how do you manage that? I know how I do it; how do _you_ do it? ---
**Author:** ![begbert2](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/begbert2/32/3357_2.png) [@begbert2](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/begbert2)\ **Post date:** [March 18, 2020, 10:19pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/can-you-fight-nihilism/849561/70 "2020-03-18T22:19:16Z")
> [@The\_Other\_Waldo\_Pepper](#): > > Again, you keep saying stuff like this: that something isn’t _valid,_ or that something _would be wrong_ — almost as if, and stay with me for a moment here, you think you have a meaningful and important way of gauging _validity_, or of making evaluations in terms of _rightness and wrongness_. > > So, how do you manage that? I know how I do it; how do _you_ do it? Good question, especially since him doing any sort of value judgement would instantly prove that dismissing nihilism based on subjective valuation of things is valid. ---
**Author:** ![Mijin](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/mijin/32/9369_2.png) [@Mijin](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Mijin)\ **Post date:** [March 19, 2020, 4:24am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/can-you-fight-nihilism/849561/71 "2020-03-19T04:24:58Z")
> [@Machinaforce](#): > > Because it still acts as though life has meaning hence him climbing the tree, because he sees value in that. The comic isn’t embracing nihilism, it’s still deflecting from the major point. No, if the comic had been one person being nihilistic and the other person saying “Hey, come climb a tree” we could claim it was ambiguous and perhaps suggesting life has meaning after all. But both characters explicitly agree about Nihilism, then one decides to go climb a tree. It’s just an acknowledgement that dwelling on nihilism is itself pointless, and if we see value personally in doing something, then do it. Don’t worry about whether it has over-arcing “meaning”. ---
**Author:** ![Sigene](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/df788c/32.png) [@Sigene](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Sigene)\ **Post date:** [March 19, 2020, 7:01am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/can-you-fight-nihilism/849561/72 "2020-03-19T07:01:03Z")
I used to have this problem. Seriously, life doesn’t have any meaning. Ultimately it doesn’t matter if you are or ever were alive. but… Death doesn’t have any meaning either…it doesn’t matter if you die. So we all can chose to live or die; it doesn’t matter. WHat keeps me alive currently, is that the people in my life don’t see that living or dying doesn’t matter and I don’t want to make them sad. They are blissful in their ignorance that life has some meaning and it would be rude of me to cause them discomfort… for what its worth, I choose to not be an asshole and make their day harder. So, meh, I guess I can’t be bothered to off myself; and if people in my existence aren’t sharp enough to see the futility of living, then I guess I’ll live if its only not to be a hassle to them. ---
**Author:** ![ftg](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/ftg/32/2801_2.png) [@ftg](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/ftg)\ **Post date:** [March 19, 2020, 12:27pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/can-you-fight-nihilism/849561/73 "2020-03-19T12:27:43Z")
It seems to me that if you are fussy about the definition of Nihilism then you aren’t a Nihilist. ---
**Author:** ![QuickSilver](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/quicksilver/32/7832_2.png) [@QuickSilver](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/QuickSilver)\ **Post date:** [March 19, 2020, 4:15pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/can-you-fight-nihilism/849561/74 "2020-03-19T16:15:25Z")
> [@Machinaforce](#): > > His book essentially proves it. The such ways of dealing with nihilism are not valid. In what way does he “prove” it? Because he wrote a book? J.K. Rawling wrote some books about magic. Is that proof? You have some esoteric ideas about the meaning of “proof”. ---
**Author:** ![begbert2](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/begbert2/32/3357_2.png) [@begbert2](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/begbert2)\ **Post date:** [March 19, 2020, 8:49pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/can-you-fight-nihilism/849561/75 "2020-03-19T20:49:26Z")
> [@Sigene](#): > > I used to have this problem. > Seriously, life doesn’t have any meaning. Ultimately it doesn’t matter if you are or ever were alive. > > but… > Death doesn’t have any meaning either…it doesn’t matter if you die. So we all can chose to live or die; it doesn’t matter. > > WHat keeps me alive currently, is that the people in my life don’t see that living or dying doesn’t matter and I don’t want to make them sad. They are blissful in their ignorance that life has some meaning and it would be rude of me to cause them discomfort… for what its worth, I choose to not be an asshole and make their day harder. So, meh, I guess I can’t be bothered to off myself; and if people in my existence aren’t sharp enough to see the futility of living, then I guess I’ll live if its only not to be a hassle to them. In your opinion, does life being meaningless make food taste bad? Does it make enjoying a movie impossible? Does it make enjoying another person’s company impossible? Does it make loving somebody impossible? If you love somebody, is it possible to be sad when they’re gone? I personally don’t bother about whether life has some sort of objective meaning, because the concept of objective meaning itself is incoherent nonsense. (To have meaning is to mean something to somebody. The objective perspective specifically excludes the idea that there’s somebody pondering the meanings. Thus objective meanings are literally an incoherent concept, a fact that any philosopher worth listening to should know.) I also don’t fear death, because I’m an atheist and know there is nothing to fear. But the fact that it would make my family unhappy if I died does provide me a reason to avoid death - and it does it without their realization that objective meaning is a stupid concept even coming into it. ---
**Author:** ![begbert2](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/begbert2/32/3357_2.png) [@begbert2](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/begbert2)\ **Post date:** [March 19, 2020, 9:32pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/can-you-fight-nihilism/849561/76 "2020-03-19T21:32:23Z")
Building off my prior parenthetical note, let’s dig a little deeper into how phenomenally stupid the OP’s version of nihilism is. The idea is that once you have blithely dismissed all the perspectives and interpretations of humans (which we do because the book’s writer thinks they’re shallow - which is of course a lie; we’re actually doing it because they disprove his point), once you’ve dismissed all the people who are capable of finding meaning in things, life has no meaning. (After which the book’s writer claims to go on and reconstruct meaning from the collective perspectives of people, which suddenly start mattering again because this time them mattering _doesn’t_ disprove the author’s point. But **Machinaforce** ignores this part because it disproves _his_ point.) So what’s going on here is that we’re removing all observers, and claiming that removes meaning from reality. Well, if you can do that with all reality, you can do it with other things - like, say, the following sequence of characters: “gift”. “gift”, a seen here, is a collection of light and dark pixels which we’re interpreting as lines and curves which we’re interpreting as a sequence of letters which we’re interpreting as a word which we’re interpreting as referring to a member of a specific class of things. There’s a lot of interpreting going on here, and we human observers are doing it. So what happens when we look away from the screen? Does “gift” lose its meaning? Does it stop referring to objects that are freely given or received? There are actually two possible answers here. The first is that, yes, absent a human observer “gift” ceases to have meaning. Not because there’s some kind of void, but because “having meaning” is a process that only occurs while something is observing and interpreting it. This answer is bolstered by the fact that if somebody who doesn’t understand english sees “gift” it will mean nothing to them - unless maybe they’re german, in which case it might mean “poison”! From this perspective the symbols only have meaning in the eyes of a beholder. The second possible answer is that “gift” retains its meaning even when the reader looks away, because the series of symbols “gift” _has_ meaning, which is there to be understood by everyone who looks at it while knowing written english. This interpretation has a lot in common with the concepts of authorial intent and object permanence; meanings that are understood by anyone objectively exist. “gift” _does_ refer to gifts, whether anybody is reading the word at the time, because the word has a meaning by definition. It _also_ means ‘poison’, by a different set of definitions; both sets of definitions exist simultaneously, and both definitions have objective existence because they are not limited to a particular person’s perspective. But let’s go back to the first answer again, since it’s the one that’s analogous to the nihilism in question. One thing to notice is that “gift” lacking meaning is _dependent_ on there not being an observer. If there is an observer, and that observer is interpreting the word as meaning gift (or as meaning poison), then it would be absurd to claim that the word lacks meaning. Sure, under this interpretation it lacks _objective_ meaning, but that’s obviously irrelevant to everything from a practical perspective; you can’t use its objective meaningless as a reason to say that it _doesn’t_ mean “gift” or “poison” to people. That would be both stupid and demonstrating a complete lack of understanding for why you’re claiming it lacks objective meaning in the first place. And that level of stupidity and self-contradiction is similarly present in the nihilism the OP is discussing. ---
**Author:** ![Inigo\_Montoya](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/inigo_montoya/32/124_2.png) [@Inigo\_Montoya](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Inigo_Montoya)\ **Post date:** [March 21, 2020, 5:43pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/can-you-fight-nihilism/849561/77 "2020-03-21T17:43:32Z")
> [@ftg](#): > > It seems to me that if you are fussy about the definition of Nihilism then you aren’t a Nihilist. Shit, here we go with the “No true nihilist” argument… 😃 ---
**Author:** ![QuickSilver](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/quicksilver/32/7832_2.png) [@QuickSilver](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/QuickSilver)\ **Post date:** [March 21, 2020, 7:01pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/can-you-fight-nihilism/849561/78 "2020-03-21T19:01:16Z")
> [@Machinaforce](#): > > Actually they never took it to it’s logical conclusion, they always backed out the the ways the author I am talking about says they do. No one knows how to deal with the truth of our existence. Bullshit. The only truth is, we exist. Deal with it. ---
**Author:** ![Machinaforce](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/aeb1de/32.png) [@Machinaforce](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Machinaforce)\ **Post date:** [March 23, 2020, 6:16pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/can-you-fight-nihilism/849561/79 "2020-03-23T18:16:24Z")
> [@begbert2](#): > > Building off my prior parenthetical note, let’s dig a little deeper into how phenomenally stupid the OP’s version of nihilism is. > > The idea is that once you have blithely dismissed all the perspectives and interpretations of humans (which we do because the book’s writer thinks they’re shallow - which is of course a lie; we’re actually doing it because they disprove his point), once you’ve dismissed all the people who are capable of finding meaning in things, life has no meaning. (After which the book’s writer claims to go on and reconstruct meaning from the collective perspectives of people, which suddenly start mattering again because this time them mattering _doesn’t_ disprove the author’s point. But **Machinaforce** ignores this part because it disproves _his_ point.) > > So what’s going on here is that we’re removing all observers, and claiming that removes meaning from reality. Well, if you can do that with all reality, you can do it with other things - like, say, the following sequence of characters: “gift”. > > “gift”, a seen here, is a collection of light and dark pixels which we’re interpreting as lines and curves which we’re interpreting as a sequence of letters which we’re interpreting as a word which we’re interpreting as referring to a member of a specific class of things. There’s a lot of interpreting going on here, and we human observers are doing it. > > So what happens when we look away from the screen? Does “gift” lose its meaning? Does it stop referring to objects that are freely given or received? > > There are actually two possible answers here. The first is that, yes, absent a human observer “gift” ceases to have meaning. Not because there’s some kind of void, but because “having meaning” is a process that only occurs while something is observing and interpreting it. This answer is bolstered by the fact that if somebody who doesn’t understand english sees “gift” it will mean nothing to them - unless maybe they’re german, in which case it might mean “poison”! From this perspective the symbols only have meaning in the eyes of a beholder. > > The second possible answer is that “gift” retains its meaning even when the reader looks away, because the series of symbols “gift” _has_ meaning, which is there to be understood by everyone who looks at it while knowing written english. This interpretation has a lot in common with the concepts of authorial intent and object permanence; meanings that are understood by anyone objectively exist. “gift” _does_ refer to gifts, whether anybody is reading the word at the time, because the word has a meaning by definition. It _also_ means ‘poison’, by a different set of definitions; both sets of definitions exist simultaneously, and both definitions have objective existence because they are not limited to a particular person’s perspective. > > But let’s go back to the first answer again, since it’s the one that’s analogous to the nihilism in question. One thing to notice is that “gift” lacking meaning is _dependent_ on there not being an observer. If there is an observer, and that observer is interpreting the word as meaning gift (or as meaning poison), then it would be absurd to claim that the word lacks meaning. Sure, under this interpretation it lacks _objective_ meaning, but that’s obviously irrelevant to everything from a practical perspective; you can’t use its objective meaningless as a reason to say that it _doesn’t_ mean “gift” or “poison” to people. That would be both stupid and demonstrating a complete lack of understanding for why you’re claiming it lacks objective meaning in the first place. > > And that level of stupidity and self-contradiction is similarly present in the nihilism the OP is discussing. I would have to concede that his argument essentially boils down to “I don’t like the usual answers because they don’t satisfy” but then when I asked him he said he has spent 15 years trying to solve that, which I don’t see how because it would be akin to asking a map where to go. All it says is how to not where to. I still don’t know what they mean in the reviews about how “you’re already dead”, sounds like Zeno’s Paradox. ---
**Author:** ![QuickSilver](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/quicksilver/32/7832_2.png) [@QuickSilver](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/QuickSilver)\ **Post date:** [March 23, 2020, 8:19pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/can-you-fight-nihilism/849561/80 "2020-03-23T20:19:57Z")
> [@Machinaforce](#): > > I would have to concede that his argument essentially boils down to “I don’t like the usual answers because they don’t satisfy” but then when I asked him he said he has spent 15 years trying to solve that, which I don’t see how because it would be akin to asking a map where to go. All it says is how to not where to. I still don’t know what they mean in the reviews about how “you’re already dead”, sounds like Zeno’s Paradox. I don’t know what reviews you’re talking about but I’m going to take a guess that “you’re already dead” is akin to, “It’s already broken”, which is a common sarcastic response to a question of whether a glass is half full or half empty. In other words, forget trying to figure out the meaning of life, “you’re already dead”. i.e. meaning is irrelevant when faced with the reality that everybody dies in the end. As you fumble your way down the path of enlightenment, you have to develop the ability to detect irony/humor/sarcasm in the materials that you read. Not everything is meant to be taken seriously. Lighten up, Francis. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/can-you-fight-nihilism/849561.md?page=3) [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/can-you-fight-nihilism/849561.md?page=5)