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

by Robert Pantano

In The Gay Science Nietzsche wrote: God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives . . . Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must we ourselves not become gods simply to appear worthy of it?

there is in fact no universal, objective truth to be known. “There are no facts, only interpretations,” he wrote. Nietzsche denied the very construct of any sort of truth with a capital T, and suggested that all attempts to find one were woefully misguided and actually the source of disconnection preventing modern man from rediscovering any meaning in life.

he would turn his attention toward creating a philosophy that detached the individual from dependence on any collective experience or cultural mechanisms, and rather, focused on the individual pursuit of creative expression and subjective greatness, placing the creation of meaning squarely in the hands of the individual.

The overman is described as a sort of defiant, confident, independent individual who pursues their personal desires with vigor and dignifies their independent beliefs unapologetically;

Nietzsche sets up the overman to function as a sort of idealized version of oneself—an image of a perfect and powerful being who has overcome all their fears and deficiencies, which one can and should set goals to strive toward.

Nietzsche proposed that the world, including the human world, operates from a principle that he called the will to power: an insatiable desire in each living being to manifest power.

according to Nietzsche, this will to power is manifested in the desire for personal growth and satisfied in the pursuit of said growth. It is important to note here that his notion of power does not necessarily refer to physical strength nor power and dominance over others, but rather, power over oneself.

“If we have our own why in life, we shall get along with almost any how,” Nietzsche

Arthur Schopenhauer, who proposed that suffering is best minimized

Nietzsche argued that suffering is a good thing that should be leaned into, embraced, and used as fuel toward the amassing o...

“The meaninglessness of suffering, not suffering itself, was the curse that lay over mankind so far,” Nietzsche

If right now you were told that you would relive this life exactly how it has gone and exactly how it will go, with all its ups and downs, fortunes and tragedies, pleasures and pains, over and over for eternity, what would you think?

amor fati. The phrase amor fati is Latin for love of one’s fate.

Nietzsche described it in this way: My formula for greatness in a human being is amor fati: that one wants nothing to be different, not forward, not backward, not in all eternity. Not merely bear what is necessary, still less conceal it . . . but love it.

in this reality, the one we must live, there was no option to have done differently, and there is no other way for things to go. Every decision you’ve made was the best and only decision you could’ve made at the time with the information you had and the state of mind you were in.

The true challenge and task of life, for Nietzsche, is to fall in love with what you are actually experiencing right now, as it is, in all the ways it is.

Amor fati is a sentiment of willingness to accept at last the way things have gone and will go, to love a life that tries in almost every moment to make you hate it, and to still stare back at it and say yes, I love it.

Cioran reveal his promising, young intellectual mind, but also what would go on to become the reoccurring, lifelong themes and obsessions found in his other work—themes like despair, suffering, social isolation, absurdity, futility, failure, decay, and death.

The Trouble with Being Born, he discusses how since death necessarily follows from birth, it is actually the memory of our birth that is the tragic problem of life, and not death in and of itself.

Cioran: When all the current reasons—moral, esthetic, religious, social, and so on—no longer guide one’s life, how can one sustain life without succumbing to nothingness? Only by a connection with the absurd, by love of absolute uselessness, loving something which does not have substance but which simulates an illusion of life.

can those who accept and embrace failure and disaster ever really fail or be struck by either?

Pessimism, in this sense, almost serves as a trump card—the last true failure being the failure of optimism. From there, we become, as he put it, “invincible victims.”

As a sort of antiphilosophy philosopher who argued that life cannot be reconciled into something meaningful, he nonetheless did so by philosophizing (at least in some form). The philosophy of nihilism, with which he is generally associated, denies the value of all things. But can a nihilist philosophy be expressed as a philosophy and remain a nihilist philosophy?

The process of forming meaning, it seems, can perhaps not be escaped, even by one the greatest so-called nihilists.

Generally, the term Kafkaesque refers to the bureaucratic nature of capitalistic, judicial, and government systems—the sort of complex, unclear processes in which no one individual ever really has a comprehensive grasp of what is going on, and the system doesn’t really care.

The crux of Kafka’s work seems to be the tension created by this confrontation with the absurd—a conflict in which a character’s efforts, reasoning, and sense of the world are met with an inescapable senselessness.

The Kafkaesque quality is found in the characters’ impossible struggles to make sense of what’s happening to them and how to resolve their situations, wherein success is both impossible and, in the end, ultimately pointless. And yet, they try anyway.

Kafka’s take on the human condition, which could be characterized as the unyielding desire for answers about and conquest of the existential problems of anxiety, guilt, absurdity, and suffering, paired with an inability to ever really understand or control the source of these problems and effectively overcome them.

Kafka’s characters don’t give up. At least initially, they continue on and fight against their situations, trying to reason, understand, or work their way out of the senselessness. But in the end, it is ultimately to no avail.

Kafka’s work sought not to alleviate the soul through remedies of false hope or delusion, but rather, through the direct confrontation with the darker aspects of life. By distorting reality to map more accurately onto his own sense of human experience, he revealed a certain remedy of unhindered self-examination and carved out a place in the world for others to do the same.

think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound or stab us. If the book we’re reading doesn’t wake us up with a blow to the head, what are we reading for? So that it will make us happy . . . Good Lord, we would be happy precisely if we had no books.

In Sartre’s lecture, Existentialism is a Humanism, he famously summarized the primary principle of existentialism with the line: “Existence precedes essence.” Essence, here, means the qualities of a thing that create its purpose.

According to Sartre and many others, there is no predetermined meaning or reason to human life. There is no authority figure designing us or our lives. And there is no essence to our existence prior to our existence. Rather, life exists for itself. Beyond itself, it is intrinsically meaningless.

we are not made with a specific purpose prior to existence, we create our purpose through our existence. In other words, through the choices we make and the actions we take in life, we create who we are and what life means.

“Man,” Sartre said, “is nothing else but what he purposes, he exists only in so far as he realises himself, he is therefore nothing else but the sum of his actions, nothing else but what his life is.”

life’s inherent meaninglessness, is an inherent freedom: the freedom to choose who we are, how we live, and what matters to us. And here we experience the next rung of our exist...

Sartre referred to this as bad faith—a form of lying to ourselves and denying our basic freedom. In other words, a short-term attempt to dampen the anxiety of being that in turn costs us our true self and our authentic sense of the world. Even choosing to not choose is still a choice.

No one else will ever know much, if anything, of what it’s like to be who we are. And for the most part, no one will ever really care. Our life is ultimately our life, and so long as we are not harming others in the process, we must create a life of our own meaning, determining our own objects of importance, committing to their pursuit, and reaping the significance and wonder of life along the way.

perhaps it is less about getting a potential course of life right and more about attempting to do so with self-honesty and virtue—to live a life that can be looked back on with the knowledge that some of our decisions were perhaps wrong in their effects but right in their intention not to sell ourselves short.

Camus’ insight highly unique and helpful in this matter is the way in which he wrestled with this concept, what he called the absurd, or man’s inescapably paradoxical relationship with the universe,

neither the human nor the universe are necessarily absurd on their own, but rather, their relationship is absurd. As humans, we exist with an innate desire for meaning, reason, and order, but yet, we simultaneously exist in a universe that appears to lack all of the above. So far as we can tell, the universe is completely indifferent. Thus, what we want and expect from the universe is fundamentally in contradiction with what we get.

“One must imagine Sisyphus happy.” With this, Camus makes the hopeful yet reasonable assertion that even in the ordinary, repetitive, absurd, and futile experiences of our life, we can and should still find worthy experience and happiness.

When referencing the predicament of Sisyphus’s fate, Camus wrote, “The struggle itself towards the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart.”

Every time I reflect on the absurdity of my existence or discover a new idea about the potential mechanisms of it, I only become more aware and forgiving of those I love, dislike, and will never know.

how often do we confuse the faults of existence in general with the faults of other people and things specifically? How often do we confuse the anxiety and confusion and plight of all humankind with our own?

compassion being referred to here suggests a sympathetic understanding of others’ lack of agreeableness—an

one thing that seems to have any positive effect against such absurdity: a sort of compassion for the whole. We must try to remember that everyone is in it, and everyone is flailing against it for the same reasons as everyone else.

the words of Schopenhauer, “Man can do what he wills but he cannot will what he wills.”

“We see the world not as it is, but as we are,” wrote twentieth-century author Anaïs

Inexorably bound to it, our view, experience, and understanding of everything is created by our unique, personal interior experience, which is created by our consciousness, which is created by the natural world, all in a reflexive, continual feedback loop. And so, the world as it actually is exists in some major part behind a veil of our subjectivity.