The Art of Living a Meaningless Existence: Ideas from Philosophy That Change the Way You Think

by Robert Pantano

perhaps an equally valuable and often neglected source of wisdom, joy, and vitality can be found not in what we know but in what we don’t know.

Henry David Thoreau wrote: My desire for knowledge is intermittent; but my desire to commune with the spirit of the universe, to be intoxicated with the fumes, call it, of that divine nectar, to bear my head through atmospheres and over heights unknown to my feet, is perennial and constant.

the experience and effects of concrete knowledge can be fleeting, but the wonder found in the spirit of the unknown can be constant and enduring.

awareness of how little we know and how little we are. The universe stares back at us with its stark glare and reminds us how deeply strange and unclear our life really is, even the most simple and normal things.

In truth, no matter what we think we know, we are probably wrong, and no matter what anyone else thinks they know, they are probably wrong. No one knows what’s going on in any fundamental sense.

“Nobody ever figures out what life is all about, and it doesn’t matter. Explore the world. Nearly everything is really interesting if you go into it deeply enough,” said renowned theoretical physicist Richard Feynman.

We should look to the universe often, not solely for answers but for perspective; for a helpful adjustment and an aerial consideration of our daily life. With this practice, the little things in life become more striking, the mistakes and the annoyances become less significant, the calm comes more easily, and the everyday activities of our lives that we so often view as wasteful and tedious reveal themselves to be wonderfully strange and curious parts of our existence that we should make effort to ponder and appreciate as often as we can.

“Through our eyes, the universe is perceiving itself. Through our ears, the universe is listening to its harmonies. We are the witnesses through which the universe becomes conscious of its glory, of its magnificence,” said twentieth-century American-British philosopher Alan Watts.

all great philosophies and religions incorporate some degree of pessimism in their foundations. What reason would philosophies and religions have to exist if they did not first admit the existence of the pains, confusions, and uncertainties of life?

Paradoxically, we must recognize that through a certain quality of pessimism, we can better arrive at a more reasonably optimistic experience of life.

light, and like silence is to song, pessimism is to optimism. Rather than being optimistic about the possibility of finding things and ideas that will rid us and our lives of disorder, defectiveness, confusion, and vulnerability, perhaps we should attempt to be optimistic about the potential value that we can find in accepting and enduring these things.

There are no known written works directly attributed to Socrates, so he remains a fairly mysterious figure. All accounts of his life and philosophy are provided by other classical writers, many of which differ and sometimes contradict each other.

the Socratic problem: the fact that it is difficult, if not impossible, to fully pin down an accurate picture of what he believed.

“I am wiser than this man; for neither of us really knows anything fine and good, but this man thinks he knows something when he does not, whereas I, as I do not know anything, do not think I do either. I seem, then, in just this little thing to be wiser than this man at any rate, that what I do not know I do not think I know either.”

believing that evil is always done out of ignorance and harms the doer more than the victim;

Socrates’ efforts were often poorly received by the public. After pushing his luck too far, he was put on trial for religious impiety and corrupting the youth. He was found guilty and sentenced to death. In 399 BC, he would be given a cup of poison hemlock to drink,

Plato would follow in Socrates’ footsteps of skepticism, critical questioning, reasoning, and the prioritization of knowledge toward achieving what was termed arete, or virtue.

Following Socrates’ tradition of skepticism, Plato’s next move was to question how we can and do come to know things at all.

Plato believed that knowledge is possible and that there are fixed, objective truths to be discovered and used—or more accurately, rediscovered, because Plato believed all knowledge was innate prior to birth and then forgotten upon birth, requiring recollection through reasoning.

Platonic idealism, Plato would separate the realm of truth from the material world, distinguishing the world of things as we perceive them from...

a realm beyond time, space, and the human mind, containing universalities and abstract objects that exist in their most pure, unchanging ideal form...

the Allegory of the Cave, which is contained in book seven of his work, The Republic.

Plato creates the distinction between the shadows and the objects they are cast by to parallel the Forms and the material world we experience—how we are all caved inside our own senses, restricted from and ignorant of the true forms of things.

How does the prisoner who was freed know that once outside, he is not merely in another sort of cave? How does he know that the objects in their supposed truer, pure form outside the cave are not merely another sort of crude shadow cast by another purer source he is not yet aware of or perhaps can never be aware of? And if he were to somehow reach or discover a subsequent truer realm, how would he know this one to be true? Does not the increasingly common discovery of ‘obviously’ true things to be untrue increase the odds that what is currently being discovered is also untrue?

Although perhaps they were the escaped prisoners of their time, they were nonetheless still prisoners in another cave just outside of the first one. Perhaps all reality is a prison and time is its guard.

the Socratic paradox: I know that I know nothing.

The ancient Chinese philosophy known as Taoism is one of the primary schools of thought that emerged and sustained out of a volatile but intellectually enriched period of Chinese history, roughly between 700 and 200 BC.

the story goes that Lao Tzu grew tired of the increasing bureaucracy and corruption of Zhou and decided to leave. On his way out of the kingdom, a border official recognized him and, knowing of his reputation of wisdom, asked Lao Tzu if he would write down his insights prior to leaving. Allegedly, Lao Tzu did, and this would become the Tao Te Ching,

Central to Taoism is the idea that everything is in a continual state of flux, ceaselessly changing and adapting. Thus, no single idea or thing is to be attached to. Nothing is to be forced in or out of place. All is to be permitted to run its natural course, subject to the one, constant, unchanging truth: everything changes.

The Tao is generally translated as the way, which in the context of Taoism, refers to the natural way or order of the universe.

“The Tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao. The name that can be named is not the eternal name. The unnamable is the eternal real,” Lao Tzu wrote in the opening lines of the Tao Te Ching.

Essential to Taoism is living according to the Tao. Put more simply, it is living in accordance with nature.

accepting the fluctuation of everything and giving up rigid judgments, attachments, expectations, and our efforts to control our lives. In doing so, one becomes more closely intertwined with the natural order of things, taking on a sort of fluid, intuitive, and harmonious relationship with the natural world.

the concept of Wu Wei, which generally translates as non-doing o...

In the same way that a bowl’s emptiness allows for it to be filled and made useful, for Lao Tzu, emptying or stilling the mind allows actions to unfold more effectively. In many respects, this idea of Wu Wei parallels modern day positive psychology’s notion of the flow state.

Taoists believe that life operates most functionally when simplified to a more intuitive, natural intelligence.

Realizing this truth of the world, now, Siddhartha could no longer stay in the palace. Rather, he found himself compelled by a quest to overcome and deal with his new conception of life.

asceticism, which involves a complete renunciation of earthly indulgences and pleasures in an attempt to loosen the attachment of the body to the physical world, and in doing so, free the self.

Most of what is known about the Buddha and his teachings is based on oral accounts that were written down centuries after his death,

The Four Noble Truths. The First Noble Truth is that life is fundamentally suffering. No matter who or what they are, all living things are bound and connected by this intrinsic existential quality of suffering, in its broadest sense.

The Second Noble Truth argues that this suffering is a consequence of our desires and attachments.

The third truth, in a revolutionary way of thinking for its time, goes on to claim that since suffering is a product of attachment and desire, one can personally overcome and end suffering by elimi...

The fourth and final Noble Truth contains the steps Buddha believed were necessary to do so. This collection of steps would be named the Noble Eightfold Path...

These eight steps include right view, right intention, right speech, right action, right livelihood, right effort, right mi...

the practice of wisdom, universal compassion, moderation, self-knowledge, and reaching enlightenment, or Nirvana, through non-attachment and the elimination of desire. Essential to the success of the Buddha’s teachings is this final idea of non-attachment or no desire.

Buddha argued that our external world is in perpetual, unattainable flux, and consequently, so too are we. We are but collections of constantly changing interactions between the world and our thoughts, and thus, the idea of a fixed, independent, identifiable self is a delusion.

it suggests that the self that we are trying to satisfy, escape, or eternalize never even really exists in the first place.

suffer not as a result of not having enough things like money, status, success, or ideal external circumstances, but because the desire for such things is attached to the impossible delusion of a permanent self capable of being satisfied by desire.

Though one may conquer a thousand times a thousand men in battle, yet he indeed is the noblest victor who conquers himself. Self-conquest is far better than the conquest of others.

two main overarching schools: Theravada and Mahayana.