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

by Robert Pantano

Michel de Montaigne wrote, “My life has been full of terrible misfortunes most of which never happened.”

I don’t come away from listening to a beautiful piece of music having learned anything concrete or academic about the world, but nonetheless, with the right song, I often feel I have learned all there is to know.

What makes the sad song that I listen to when I’m in my worst of moods work is that it validates my feelings and transmutes them rather than denies them.

Motivation, rather, must go beneath the banal clichés of traditional ideals of happiness, success, and absolute meaning, and address the very real, bleak nature of our reality.

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.

And every condition of life that either these decisions led to or that are fundamental to life in general, you have no control over and cannot change.

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.

perhaps the best one can do in the face of death is to use it to put the life they have into perspective.

René Descartes, which argues that the mind (or consciousness) and the brain are two distinctly separate things; that the brain doesn’t create consciousness but acts as a sort of connection point between the physical body and some otherworldly,