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

by Robert Pantano

There is a need for a type of food that nourishes the mind and spirit—a food that people from all around the world and at all times in history have contributed small but notable servings of in the form of philosophy and art.

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. Nothing about this life is simple or clear, and from the perspective of the stars, nothing down here on earth—including us—matters all that much to anything beyond itself.

There is courage in facing the realities of pessimism and there is strength to be formed in its name. We must be pessimistic about life’s conditions in order to face their realities, but we must also be optimistic about our ability to face their realities and form strength, meaning, and experience through them.

Perhaps all reality is a prison and time is its guard.

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. And so, it is perhaps nothing but a confirmation of this idea that the interpretation of Taoism’s ideas, in some sense, changes over time.

Like water is humble and soft yet erodes the sides of mountains and dissolves rocks by quietly, patiently, and persistently flowing its natural course, so too should the human act.

the general story of the Buddha arguably always remains the same at its core: it 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.

In the words of Kahlil Gibran, from his poem, On Freedom: At the city gate and by your fireside I have seen you prostrate yourself and worship your own freedom, Even as slaves humble themselves before a tyrant and praise him though he slays them. Ay, in the grove of the temple and in the shadow of the citadel I have seen the freest among you wear their freedom as a yoke and a handcuff. And my heart bled within me; for you can only be free when even the desire of seeking freedom becomes a harness to you, and when you cease to speak of freedom as a goal and a fulfilment. . . . In truth that which you call freedom is the strongest of these chains, though its links glitter in the sun and dazzle your eyes.

The principles of Stoicism can help us find calmness, presence, and resilience in a world of increasingly overt chaos, anxiety, and the insatiable desire for more. In the Stoic view, we exist in a reality that does not care about our opinion of it.

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.

It is now that we must find time and it is now that we must find happiness if it is either that we are seeking, because if we do not focus the lens through which we view life right now, everything we see from this moment forward will remain out of focus.

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

If we shouldn’t stress over what we can’t change or control outside of ourselves, perhaps at a point, we shouldn’t stress about what we can’t control inside of ourselves either.

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

Everyone is experiencing the same dissonance of being, living their own story through the nauseating rollercoaster of ups and downs to nowhere.

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. This is not to suggest the solipsistic stance that the physical world does not exist outside of consciousness, but that the particular image of the world we experience does not.

In all cases, for the most part, knowing what the real color of things are (metaphorically speaking) is perhaps minimally relevant to living and thriving as an individual and as a species. Perhaps what matters more is that we can agree and disagree on subjective things sufficiently well enough, cordially enough, and often enough. And it seems as though that in order to do so, if such a feat is possible, the prerequisite is a willingness to embrace often being wrong. Naturally and culturally, the desire to be right is a deeply enduring and forceful one. As often as possible, sometimes at all costs and despite good reason, we are both compelled by our psyche and pressured by our social world to always be right. And when we aren’t, it hurts—so much so that it can often create horrible sensations in the brain akin to that of real physical pain.

In the words of American author David Foster Wallace: Learning how to think really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience.

it is to say that often anger comes from a place that isn’t angry about the thing we seem to be angry about, that anger is often a liability and not an asset, and that we aren’t locked in to falling victim to it by always letting ourselves think that we have personally been made victims by the world.

In the same way that wisdom about the world begins with knowing you know nothing, wisdom of the self begins with knowing you know, at the very least, very little about who you really are.

The day-to-day requirements and expectations of social life—to be calm, certain, patient, responsible, impressive, rational, and all the rest—can, in any given moment, go against all the likely reasons to not be any of these things. We are made out of and live in the constant flurry of simultaneous electrical firings and chemical discharges of a brain trying to map a self onto a universe exploding with shifting matter. We sit at the end of this chaos, trying to narrow the ocean of time and space into a tiny, little canal. To successfully function at all, let alone impressively across a whole lifetime, is as much of a wonder as being itself.

Chaos theory takes away the long-term predictability of our actions but gifts us back a perpetual role in reality’s operation. Your legacy, albeit indirect and