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

by Robert Pantano

Henry David Thoreau wrote: My desire for knowledge is intermittent; but my desire to commune with the spirit of the universe, to be intoxicated with the fumes, call it, of that divine nectar, to bear my head through atmospheres and over heights unknown to my feet, is perennial and constant.

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.

“Nobody ever figures out what life is all about, and it doesn’t matter. Explore the world. Nearly everything is really interesting if you go into it deeply enough,” said renowned theoretical physicist Richard Feynman.

In even the most common and mundane things, there is complexity and strangeness.

At the base of almost everything, the resulting truth is this: we don’t know. When we disregard this unknowingness, we can easily become disinterested, uninspired, and worn out of this life. We can put great stress on things that perhaps don’t matter all that much and neglect experiences and things that do. We can feel the pressure and anxiety of chasing perfection and certainty, which do not exist.

We should look to the universe often, not solely for answers but for perspective;

“Through our eyes, the universe is perceiving itself. Through our ears, the universe is listening to its harmonies. We are the witnesses through which the universe becomes conscious of its glory, of its magnificence,” said twentieth-century American-British philosopher Alan Watts.

we experience more of life, and we are continually disappointed by our optimism’s inability to align with the real conditions of the world, our optimism is beaten further and further into submission.

Despite the chaos, uncertainties, and hardships, we want to go on, we want to endure, we want to see what we can do, overcome, and experience in the face of it all. In this, we find the hopeful spirit and strength of humankind. We find the optimism in the pessimism.

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.

what I do not know I do not think I know either.”

Plato believed that knowledge is possible and that there are fixed, objective truths to be discovered and used—or

Platonic idealism,

For Plato, reality as we observe it is a flawed reflection of a higher truth that exists in a realm beyond time, space, and the human mind, containing universalities and abstract objects that exist in their most pure, unchanging ideal form.

we are all caved inside our own senses, restricted from and ignorant of the true forms of things.

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

Perhaps there are no ultimate answers in philosophy, perhaps there never will be, but there are no ultimate answers in music, in art, in a beautiful landscape, or in a conversation with a friend, and yet, I know of no one who does not find value, insight, love, and solace in all of these things.

Perhaps what we should and only can do is to try to enjoy the process of playing with the blocks of philosophy like children playing with toy blocks for no reason other than the curiosity and fun of it; not because in the end the blocks will provide something that stays up forever, but because we inevitably will take the blocks down, put them away for a little while, and then play with them again on another day, in a different way.

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.

the Tao is more of a blanket, abstract term for what is beyond human conception and comprehension—a sort of force or substrate that creates and propels all things for apparently no reason; the incomprehensible origin and destination of the universe where logic and human sensibility collapse; the infinite and the nothing in a singular, unified, eternal dance with themselves for themselves; a creation without a creator.

one can accomplish this by accepting the fluctuation of everything and giving up rigid judgments, attachments, expectations, and our efforts to control our lives.

Taoists believe that life operates most functionally when simplified to a more intuitive, natural intelligence.

asceticism, which involves a complete renunciation of earthly indulgences and pleasures in an attempt to loosen the attachment of the body to the physical world, and in doing so, free the self.

We are but collections of constantly changing interactions between the world and our thoughts, and thus, the idea of a fixed, independent, identifiable self is a delusion.

the capital I that we describe is merely a state of emptiness constantly being filled and emptied by the succession of each moment.

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.

to what extent do we really have any control over our desires, the information we encounter, and how it all works together to affect us?

influencing many significant Western philosophers such as Arthur Schopenhauer, Friedrich Nietzsche, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Emil Cioran, Alan Watts, and many others.

A 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.

the kōan harmonizes with the obscurity of life and disregards the need for conclusive answers.

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.

Zen and the lesson of the kōans suggest that we should flow with life, ask questions, contemplate them, but not become tricked by any singular idea or answer that might tempt us into a final resolution.

In truth, the freest of people are free to think and see things however they choose, but only so long as it is with words that exist through concepts that have been construed in a brain that has been built with respect to an environment that has been experienced, all moved by the laws of the natural world.

It is a demonstration of humanity’s overzealous ego and anthropocentrism to think that so long as no other humans tell them what to do, they are free.

“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.

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: 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.

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.

Stoicism argues that the sign of a truly successful person is someone who can be ok without the things he or she typically desires or depends on for comfort.

Stoicism also claims that we are but a tiny feature of the entire body of nature, and everything that happens to us is a matter of relevance and necessity to everything beyond us.

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.

A 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.

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

Epictetus similarly wrote, “Man is not worried by real problems so much as by his imagined anxieties about real problems.”

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

there is likely no heroic, ultimate defeat of worry, but only small, mini victories, moment to moment, along the way.

It’s not that we have a short time to live but that we waste most of it. Lucius Annaeus Seneca

Time, in Seneca’s mind, is to be viewed like any other commodity—and if anything else, it is to be viewed as the most valuable one.

to confront the concept of time, one must first fully confront the conditions of one’s relationship with its finitude and accept one’s fate as an observer or sort of passenger to it—that we are slipping in every moment toward the end of all moments, and, at any moment, it could all be cut short.