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

by Robert Pantano

He would soon become very skeptical of the so-called wisdom of the time, finding that most men who claimed wisdom and were held to be wise were essentially just arrogant.

. . . conversing with him, this man seemed to me to seem to be wise to many other people and especially to himself, but not to be so; and then I tried to show him that he thought he was wise, but was not. As a result, I became hateful to him and to many of those present; and so, as I went away, I thought to myself, “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.”

Socrates would go on to spend much of his time attempting to teach and convince others to question what they held to be true, and realize, as he put it, that “[t]he only true wisdom is knowing you know nothing.” In doing so, he believed he would compel others to join him on a journey of philosophical inquiry toward a better life as they realized their current answers and beliefs were insufficient.

As time passed, Socrates would garner a following of young students interested in his way of thinking. Although he was skeptical of knowledge and popular ideas, he was not without convictions. He taught and made claims about politics, being extremely critical of democracy; he made assessments of values, prioritizing virtue, self-knowledge, goodness, truth, and happiness over wealth, fame, and power; he developed explanations of ethics, believing that evil is always done out of ignorance and harms the doer more than the victim; he defined concepts of the soul; and the list goes on. What is most notable, however, is that, in contrast to the more cosmic focus of the Presocratic thinkers, Socrates maintained that the purpose of philosophy was to answer the very practical, down-to-earth question “What is the way we ought to live?”

Plato would refer to these as the Forms and suggested that they function as the fundamental building blocks of the material world. As a simplified example, consider how there are many trees in the world but that no two trees are identical. Despite the fact that each tree is different from the rest, all of them—despite their differences—are still trees. According to Plato, this is because all trees are imperfect shadows of the perfect, ideal Form of a tree—that all trees have as their model. It is through our knowledge of this perfect and ideal Form of a tree that we recognize a tree as a tree; that we discern the treeness in every tree. From a practical standpoint, Plato suggested that through reason and philosophy, individuals and societies could understand ideals such as justice, happiness, friendship, being, and goodness, in order strive toward and attain them.

Everything is pushed or pulled through something by something toward something.

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.

other words, engaging in tasks with a deep focus and presence, surrendering to more spontaneous instincts.

But regardless of this and the potential limits of its applicability, the concepts suggested by Taoism are filled with rich insights that provide worthy, useful counterweights to the more common, brutish ways of mind and culture that make us think that things must always be a different way or must go one’s own way for it to be the right way, that there must always be some better ideal around the corner that isn’t or couldn’t be in this moment right now, and that one needs to seek or strive for what they already have and know.

is a story of us all. It is the story of growing up, becoming curious and tempted, seeking to move out and beyond the borders of the sheltered reality maintained by our parents, society, and our underdeveloped psyche, beginning to discover life’s contaminated horrors for the first time, and the extreme lengths we often go to in order to try to understand, overcome, and escape them.

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 eliminating or recalibrating one’s desires and attachments. The fourth and final Noble Truth contains the steps Buddha believed were necessary to do so.

These eight steps include right view, right intention, right speech, right action, right livelihood, right effort, right mindfulness, and right concentration. These concepts are not so much steps to be achieved or discovered in a linear order, but rather, a wheel of actively circulating behaviors and wisdom that one must constantly turn. In broad summary, it essentially calls for 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’s teachings are about reorienting our view of our self so that we see that there is no self, and then reorient our view of the world.

According to the Buddha, we 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.

kōan is a riddle or dialectic meditation device used in Zen Buddhist practice that is intentionally designed to, at least on the surface, be unclear and obscure. Its point is not to provide a conclusion or answer to the question presented, but rather, to disregard the relevance of the answer—to detach itself from the functions of conclusion and singular resolution. There are over a thousand known kōans that follow this format, all used to test and challenge Zen Buddhists and reveal the obscurity and limits of the mind.

However, thoughts and words, of course, can only describe and understand the world in terms of thoughts and words. As a result, they cannot make sense of what exists beyond thoughts and words, which so much of life does. Like any tools, thinking and language are limited to the confines of their abilities. Like a hammer cannot screw in a screw, and a nail cannot cut a board of wood, the human mind cannot make sense of the mindless.

Zen is a subset of Buddhism that is not concerned with concrete ideas and concepts, and so, it is not really much of a belief system at all. Rather, it is considered to be more of a state of being. In other words, it involves living in accordance with one’s limitations to articulate and understand things in any absolute sense and living more off intuition and spontaneity.

One of mankind’s greatest longings is complete freedom. One of mankind’s greatest limitations is the inability to ever truly be free. We want the frictionless state of our origins. We want the autonomy of a god. We want the sea of reality to part at the whim of our fluctuating, individual will. We want, as is so often the case, what we cannot have.

absolute freedom of the existential kind, in which one is able to do, feel, and choose what one wants, how and when they see fit without any kind of coercion, restraint, or imposition, is the ideal of freedom that drives the passionate pursuit of all other kinds, and perhaps, all human activity in general.

We are stuck inside the body, captives to it, subject to its faulty and fragile mechanisms that do and will break, keeping us bound in space according to its condition—until it finally turns itself off, and us with it. And what’s more, our body controls much of what we choose to do with it—how we move it, where we move it, and why. Being told when to eat, when to go to the bathroom, when to sleep, when to wake up; that is the daily routine of a prisoner, not a free human being.

Human beings should undoubtedly strive and fight for all their earthly freedoms within the physical, social, economic, and political domains of the world. But if and once they have, the remaining unsatisfied existential freedom, in search of which they will continue to drink and run and lust and love, perhaps requires a different kind of consideration. “Freedom can be manifested only in the void of beliefs, in the absence of axioms, and only where the laws have no more authority than a hypothesis,” wrote the philosopher Emil Cioran.

inexorably connected with everything that makes and interacts with it (and doesn’t). You are not the master of your mind. You are not the servant. You are both and neither. You are your thoughts and the lineage of every bit of history that they touched to get to you. You are the words you are reading and the mind that is automatically processing them. You are the mind that will forget them in some amount of time. You are everything you’ve heard and perceived. You are everything you’ve never heard or perceived. You are everything you’ve ever hated. You are everything you’ve ever loved. You are what’s inside and what’s outside your mind and your body. And you are none of the above. If you exist, you cannot be free. If there is no you, you cannot be contained by anything.

Kahlil Gibran, from his poem, On Freedom:

. . . In truth that which you call freedom is the strongest of these chains, though its links glitter in the sun and dazzle your eyes.

In the Stoic view, we exist in a reality that does not care about our opinion of it. We cannot ask it nicely to remove the chaos, suffering, hardship, and uncertainty, nor can we will ourselves onto it with force in order to do so. However, Stoicism does not suggest that we are helpless victims of the world. Rather, Stoicism claims that there are two domains of life: the external—the things outside of our mind, which we cannot control—and the internal—our mental reactions and interpretations of the external, which we can control. When we persist with the belief that things outside of ourselves or things in the future will provide us with a form of ultimate happiness, we exchange the real moments of our lives for ones that do not exist. We become dependent on things outside of ourselves that we cannot control, and we endlessly run on a treadmill of unceasing desire.

There is nothing wrong with working toward and achieving wealth, fame, or power, but in the Stoic’s mind, these things are merely to be enjoyed if they do work out, but not to be depended on for one’s happiness. Because, if one is dependent on them, one’s happiness and peace in life are especially susceptible to being inconsistent, taken, or never achieved at all.

Letters from a Stoic, the Roman statesman and renowned Stoic philosopher Seneca wrote, “Until we have begun to go without them, we fail to realize how unnecessary many things are. We’ve been using them not because we needed them but because we had them.” It is perhaps in our constant expectation that something outside of ourselves or in the future is needed for a worthwhile experience in life that causes our inability to ever find worthwhile experience in life in the first place.

We must realize that nothing is good or bad inherently; only our judgments and interpretations of things can be good or bad.

Starting from birth, we seemingly run, if not sprint, through life, racing out of every moment, unsatisfied with what life is and constantly looking to the future for what life could be if we could just obtain something more or different. Our cultures overwhelm us with the reinforcement of this idea, convincing us that our duty is to achieve, buy, own, and live perfect, unaffected lives. This delusion, however, frenzies us with an anxiety that we are then told, by culture, that we can rid ourselves of if we just achieve a few more things, make a little more money, be a little more popular, and buy a little more stuff, creating an endless feedback loop of unsatisfied hunger. If we cave into this, we surrender our life, we give up our self. In the words of Seneca, “We should not, like sheep, follow the herd of creatures in front of us, making our way where others go, not where we ought to go.”

what we do, and in the big picture, none of it really matters all that much anyway. And so, we must define our happiness not by what we own or achieve, not by how others see us, not by some bigger picture of life, but by how we think and see our self and live our own life through what we deem virtuous and relevant. Stoicism tells us we can at last, if we wish, calmly accept our indifferent reality and counter it with our own indifferent attitude in return.

key principle of Stoicism is understanding that if the only thing we can completely control in life is our internal domain, and we cannot truly control anything external, then one should try to maintain an awareness that the things we are concerned about could and very likely might happen, that life will contain moments of tragedy and sharp turns, and that we should be prepared for these moments both mentally and practically in any way we can. But equally important is recognizing that many of these sorts of catastrophic moments can’t be predicted nor controlled, and thus, after a point, worrying is pointless. Once one has done everything that is rationally and realistically preventative, one should work to revert their attention back to the present, leaving all additional concern about the future for the future. Awareness and rational preparation have value in the future at low cost to the present. But worrying about what one cannot know nor control in the future has no value to either, and comes at the cost of the present.

Seneca wrote, “We are more often frightened than hurt; and we suffer more from imagination than from reality.”

The French Renaissance philosopher and writer Michel de Montaigne wrote, “My life has been full of terrible misfortunes most of which never happened.”

We tend to hoard our money and possessions and whatever else we can get our hands on, and yet, when it comes to time, we rarely guard it or evaluate carefully how well we save and spend it. He suggested that we often give up a great deal of our time to things and people that we wouldn’t consider to be worthy of giving anything to if we slowed down and thought about what we were doing and why. “Men are thrifty in guarding their private property, but as soon as it comes to wasting time, they are most extravagant with the one commodity for which it’s respectable to be greedy,” wrote Seneca in his essay and letter entitled On The Shortness of Life.

This is essential, not only because the future might not come, but because even if it does, if we remain stuck in a constant preparatory cycle, when it arrives, it’ll just be another moment to spend preparing and longing for further future moments. Seneca wrote: It is inevitable that life will be not just very short but very miserable for those who acquire by great toil what they must keep by greater toil. They achieve what they want laboriously; they possess what they have achieved anxiously; and meanwhile they take no account of time that will never more return. New preoccupations take the place of the old, hope excites more hope and ambition more ambition. They do not look for an end to their misery, but simply change the reason for it. For Seneca, to hope to live for oneself finally in the future is to wait until it’s too late. Rather, to make the most of time is to make the most of today. “Lay hold of today’s task and you will not need to depend so much upon tomorrow’s,” he wrote.

Seneca believed that one should spend their time fulfilling their duties and responsibilities, enjoying any wealth and fortune that might come of them, but not work for

The mass of despairing individuals are not disillusioned because life is inherently meaningless, but because they willingly let themselves be pulled from their own individual meaning, distracted and tempted by the idea that somehow, through enough surplus money and possessions and achievements of this and that according to other people’s ideas and constructions, life could be made completely happy and perfect and certain.

For Nietzsche, this process, which he would term self-overcoming, is fundamental to answering and resolving the problem of meaning and value in life. So long as one establishes one’s goals of growth in the name of what one deems to be an idealized, life-affirming version of themselves, the process transmutes the suffering of life into something worthwhile and personally redeemable—a sort of alchemy of the spirit that affirms life in the face of its inevitable suffering. “If we have our own why in life, we shall get along with almost any how,” Nietzsche wrote.

Unlike his primary predecessor, Arthur Schopenhauer, who proposed that suffering is best minimized and avoided to the best of one’s ability, Nietzsche argued that suffering is a good thing that should be leaned into, embraced, and used as fuel toward the amassing of strength and psychological power. Life is in fact inevitable suffering, and so, it is not a matter of if, but for what? “The meaninglessness of suffering, not suffering itself, was the curse that lay over mankind so far,” Nietzsche wrote.

Nietzsche suggested that we must symbolically die throughout life so that we can get out of our own way and become something greater, sometimes sacrificing our self, our personal preservation, health, or sanity, perhaps Nietzsche’s life and death was just that: a process of self-overcoming toward self-sacrifice toward something greater.

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? Would you be terrified? Would you want to change it? Would you be happy with it? What could you do or think to make it ok, and perhaps even desirable? Nietzsche used a version of this contemplation as a sort of thought experiment, referred to as the eternal recurrence, to help illustrate and consider one of his most notable philosophical tenets, known as amor fati. The phrase amor fati is Latin for love of one’s fate. This concept is recognized to have first been referenced and discussed in the philosophical work of the Stoic philosophers Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius. However, Nietzsche would be the first to explicitly use and focus on the phrase, molding and integrating it as a unique, important value in his philosophy.

I want to learn more and more to see as beautiful what is necessary in things; then I shall be one of those who make things beautiful. Amor fati: let that be my love henceforth! I do not want to wage war against what is ugly. I do not want to accuse; I do not even want to accuse those who accuse. Looking away shall be my only negation. And all in all and on the whole: some day I wish to be only a Yes-sayer.

Ultimately, the question may not be how much you love your life right now, but how much you could and how. And perhaps sometimes the only way to experience the beauty of things is to think about things in a beautiful way.

One can only wonder how many individuals like Kafka have walked and continue to walk this earth, completely disconnected or restricted from ever seeing who they really are or could be. How many Kafkas have lived and died without ever sharing their voice with the world; voices that would have changed it forever? How many people never know who they’ll be after they’re gone?

Jean-Paul Sartre, we will begin to face the problem of choosing what we do with what’s been done to us.

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. For example, Sartre referenced how a paper knife is designed with a specific purpose in mind before it is made, and only once it is given a predetermined purpose and designed accordingly, is it manufactured into being; in which case, its essence precedes its existence. With the exception of itself, humanity does this with nearly everything it makes. As rational beings, we create things for reasons. Even if the reason is to make the point that we can create things for no reason, we have merely found ourselves in the paradox of creating for the reason of having none. We exist with the innate desire for reasons—reasons for what we do, who we are, why we are, and so on. And here lies the beginning of our existential problem.

“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.” The byproduct of this, of 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 existential problem: the anxiety or anguish of choice.

The easier, knee-jerk response to the anxiety of choice is simply just not choosing: to mindlessly assimilate popular, common templates and ideas of life, follow standard routes of belief and purpose already laid down for us, and deflect nearly all the responsibility of choice onto others and the circumstances of our life. Sartre referred to this as bad faith—a form of lying to ourselves and denying our basic freedom.

However, 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.

other words, 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.