The Sunny Nihilist: A Declaration of the Pleasure of Pointlessness

by Wendy Syfret

“Why does everything have to be a thing? Why can’t an ice cream just be an ice cream?”

even if there is no final payoff, answer, or transcendent nirvana, the ongoing exploration of what we’re all doing here (and to each other) is an honorable pursuit.

Problems arise when the promises and expectations tied to meaning begin to eclipse the concept itself.

“Who cares, one day I’ll be dead and no one will remember me anyway.”

Why do we live this way? Why do we support structures that don’t work, that we don’t believe in, just because they’re seen as the way to do things? How can we do better?

you reject meaning, placing you squarely in the reality of the present moment, accepting there is no cosmic divination or kindness, you are left with the responsibility of acting now.

before you can be truly motivated to reimagine a new world, you have to totally lose faith in the old one.

You would think, considering how much of my life was dedicated to it, my job was very important or very well paying. It was neither.

Notions of specialness are supposed to make you feel good, but gorge on them and they’ll also make you an asshole.

There’s a part of me that’s jealous of the clarity and simplicity religion can lend to life.

What right now is beautiful, tasty, exciting, terrifying, unknowable? What makes my life feel precious, despite knowing it is ultimately pointless?

Yet that is the torment of every teacher . . . he knows that, given the circumstances and accidents, he can become a disaster as well as a blessing to mankind.”

Relax, you’re inconsequential, so go pat a dog or something.

What do small talk, grocery lists, or social niceties mean when you understand that everything is meaningless in the scope of the universe?

If nothing actually matters, focus and priorities shift to this moment. We understand that the present, however mundane, is as fleeting, temporal, fragile, and ultimately forgettable as the greatest events in human history.

Admitting that in the span of all time our presence is meaningless eases fixations on legacy, ego, and purpose, allowing us to shift focus from “one day” to the immediate moment, and take pleasure in the random existence we were wildly lucky to be gifted at all.

If I don’t matter, and am therefore not the center of everything and the priority, then what is? If I will be forgotten and lost to time, what will be remembered, at least for a little while?

By challenging and dismantling existing structures that may in some cases personally serve us, we’re throwing away fantasies of our own importance to allow space for new ideas that reach further than our own front yards.

“If we’re here for just a blink of the eye, and in general if nothing matters, it feels like [it’s] carte blanche to wild the fuck out. To try a lot of things, try your best to do something because the odds are so good that none of it means anything that perversely it makes me feel free to try.”

Tangling with the emptiness of life means also accepting the empty finality that one day it will end.

When we say, “nothing matters,” that we have one life that will be over too soon and then forgotten, our attention migrates to the right now. The only thing that feels truly real is the present, not the projection of what could be, what might exist one day.

Our lives are a meaningless twist of chance, a bundle of luck and random events. But to exist, to have been able to experience a moment of this pointless planet, feels like such a bizarre gift, it requires no point at all.