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

by Robert Pantano

There is a world filled with malevolence and anger and greed and impatience and all the rest. But for this very reason—because compassion is so trite and yet still seemingly so hard and absent—it is perhaps all the more essential and rational to give it serious focus and effort.

the world as it actually is exists in some major part behind a veil of our subjectivity.

we are stuck between the awareness of a god and the temperament of an animal.

Human existence is so unbelievably absurd and chaotic and strange, it is a wonder that it works in our favor at all any of the time.

We are lodged inside a clump of soft tissue that we don’t even understand, experiencing a reality made of particles that we can’t perceive, all made and governed by a universe that operates in chaotic contradiction to the meaningful order we so desperately desire—the very same desire the universe forced onto us.

The desire to be liked and the concern we have over what others think of us has a clear sociological and evolutionary purpose—to cooperate effectively, reproduce, cultivate a sense of belonging, and so on. The problem, however, is the tendency for this otherwise positive impulse to grow and mutate into a state of malignancy.

for Emerson, the transcendent spiritual experience is not found in any outward, previous, or future source, but within the individual in any given moment—moments where one’s own mind illuminates the common features of the surroundings with potency, beauty, and interconnectedness.

Emerson also asserted that nature is in a constant state of flux, and that we must live in synchronization with its process, trusting our own intuition and flowing with the changing self. In order to do this, we must not hold ourselves to ideas, beliefs, or traditions of the past, including our own.

our life. In his book, The Denial of Death, twentieth-century cultural anthropologist and writer Ernest Becker

an alternative kind of heroism characterized by a sort of honesty about one’s condition: living with an intense humility and positive resignation to the awe, mystery, and chaos of the universe and our insignificant position within it.

When it comes to life and death, there are really only two certainties: you will die, but you are alive now.

There is no telling if or what comes after death, there is no telling when it will come for you, but you can know that you are alive right now. To fully enjoy the present moment as often as you can and in as many ways as you can, to fall in love with a person, a thing, a moment, yourself, to make the most of everything despite knowing that you will lose it all to nothing, is more than enough heroism.

What’s worse than living a life knowing that one will die is living a life knowing that one will die without having lived as many moments as one can properly relishing in the fact that they have not yet died.

At some point, you will do everything for the last time. You will see your last sunset; you will taste your last bite of food; you will enjoy your last laugh; you will see everyone you know one last time; you will do anything for the last time; you will be you for the last time. If there is nothing specific to be done, the only thing that truly matters is that we do what matters to us while we can. There is nothing else to do, nowhere else ...

How does the same, basic, non-sentient stuff that makes rocks and water and trees and worms, the same building blocks of everything else that isn’t aware of itself, somehow come together in such a way inside you and suddenly, out of what seems like almost nothing, become your entire ornate awareness and experience of self and life? How does it become the feeling of happiness and wonder and romance and melancholy, the experience of colors and imagined intricate scenes that only exist inside your head?

either the paste in our head creates this whole thing, or some ethereal transmission from some otherworldly dimension does. And both can only be described as unfathomably insane—a miracle in the truest sense.

to feel pain and pleasure and love and happiness and all the rest; to experience, even if just for a time, this immense kaleidoscope of physical reality from the distinct and temporary home that is its head; if the rest of the universe’s matter could look back at us, one can only assume it would cry with jealousy.

But because you think, you are. And because you understand, you are some form of consciousness. It is the one thing you can always know to be true and forever exclusively your own. Your one, single experience of everything.

It is strange and rather terrifying to consider that we can be something for now and nothing forever—but perhaps it is only because of the fact that we are nothing forever that we can be something for now.

by seeing that nothingness is the fundamental reality, and you see it’s your reality, then how can anything contaminate you? All the idea of you being scared and put out and worried and so on is just nothing. It’s a dream. Because you’re really nothing. But this is the most incredible nothing. So, cheer up! You see?

The ever-fleeting present is all there is, filtered through us at the intersection of the mystical oneness of all things and nothing. And perhaps, as such, we should try our best to be careful of what we take seriously, and what we don’t.

it is not about escaping the paradoxical troubles of life, but rather, trying your best to live well enough with and through them, and then letting things take their course.

If we realize that the bad provides the good, and the good provides the bad, we realize the contrast provides the life.

Our baseline is not something to run from or dread or fight against, but it is something to appreciate for its constant renewal of life.

Perhaps, then, our quality of life is not found in the heights of our happiness or pleasures but in how we choose to consider and look at what surrounds these extremes, how we attempt to create a life of personal intention, meaning, and decency, and justify the inevitable lows rather than always trying to escape them.

Just like how we don’t have to worship the breath to breathe, or our hair to grow hair, we don’t have to worship happiness or progress to progress and be happy. Like the inhale and exhale of each breath, the positive and negative flows in and out of us, constantly keeping us moving, progressing, and alive. Only when we hold our breath and try to keep all the oxygen in do we suffocate.

So long as there is life in us, there is the rare and exclusively human opportunity to take this chaotic, thrashing existence, this strange nothingness, and make it something. There is the chance to connect and love and help, to feel and think and live, to experience the cosmic everything. And at some point, perhaps that is enough.

At least creatively, we often perform at our best when we are ourselves, natural and honest, attending to who we really are and what we really want to say or do, without the addition of ulterior motives, without forcing it or overthinking.

Let’s consider for a moment that time travel is possible, and you went back in time some significant number of years. If while you were there, you affected something, changed something, influenced something to go differently, stopped or started something that would have otherwise happened or not, even with just tiny, insignificant alterations, it would be highly likely that you would dramatically change the course of events throughout history.

We recognize that affecting a small thing in the past can dramatically change the present, but yet, we rarely think about the way in which affecting a small thing in the present can dramatically change the future.