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

by Robert Pantano

we must live not as if we are one of the ones who will live into old age, but rather, one of the ones who might not.

only when the finitude of life reveals itself can we live in a way that might resemble how a finite life should be lived.

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.

Wasted time or well-spent time is all the same when viewed from a sufficient distance, and it is only the individual who can examine, consider, and determine the best way to balance and claim their time in each moment.

philosophy is like music. It is often less about what it says and more about how it sounds and makes me feel.

we are, in essence, merely passengers in this thing, and we don’t know what we are working toward or why or if it is even any good for us or about us at all.

psychologist Carl Jung in his concept of individuation, which suggests that there is a ring of layers that comprises our self: our outward, social personas, our conscious layers, our unconscious layers, and then a core, true self at the center of it all, which when one goes through the process of uncovering and integrating every layer into consciousness, a sense of completeness, harmony, and vitality is experienced in the form of a truer self.

we each have a sort of core self that provides a source of meaning unique to us—a source that points us to the things that we actually want and should do with our life.

What one can seem to do, however, is follow, discover, and create a personal meaningfulness that endures the fact that life can never be completely happy, perfect, or certain.

The foundation of his philosophy was established in his dissertation, On the Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason, published in 1813.

His entire unified philosophical system, including his metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, aesthetics, value judgments, and so forth, was then later laid out in his subsequent masterwork, The World as Will and Representation, published in 1819.

In 1860, he died at the age of seventy-two.

Schopenhauer’s work, it is relevant to note that it leaned heavily on the work of his predecessor, Immanuel Kant.

he was completing Kant’s system of transcend...

Schopenhauer essentially suggested that the world as we know and experience it is exclusively a representation created by our mind through our senses and forms of cognition. Consequently, we cannot access the true nature of external o...

Schopenhauer would go on to argue that not only can we not know nor access the varying objects of the world as they really are outside of our conscious experience, but there is, in fact, no...

beyond our experience is, according to Schopenhauer, a singular, unified oneness of reality—a sort of essence or force that drives existence that is beyond time,...

Schopenhauer would suggest that what is found from within, at the core of our being, is an unconscious, restless force striving toward survival, nourishment, and reproduction. He would term this force the Will.

reality is made up of two sides: the plurality of things as they are represented to a conscious apparatus, and the singular, unified force of the Will—hence

the Will, for Schopenhauer, is a blind, unconscious striving with no goal or purpose other than to keep itself going for the sake of keeping itself going.

his work also contains distinct notes of Hinduism and Buddhism.

Schopenhauer one of the first philosophers to ever really combine Eastern and Western thinking in a systematic and comprehensive way.

misfortune in general is the rule.

would describe the Will as a sort of malevolent force that we, as individual selves, become victims of in its process of continuation, deceived by our own mind and body to go against our fundamental interests and yearnings in order to carry it out.

Schopenhauer wrote: Human life must be some kind of mistake. The truth of this will be sufficiently obvious if we only remember that man is a compound of needs and necessities hard to satisfy; and that even when they are satisfied, all he obtains is a state of painlessness, where nothing remains to him but abandonment to boredom.

two primary methods: one, engaging in arts and philosophy, and two, the practice of asceticism: the deprivation of nearly all desire, self-indulgence, and material comfort.

the average person should simply make their best efforts to let go of ideals of happiness and pleasure, and instead, focus on the minimization of pain.

Happiness in life, for Schopenhauer, is not a matter of joys and pleasures, but rather, the reduction of and freedom from pain as much as possible. “The safest way of not being very miserable is not to expect to be very happy,” he wrote.

he would eventually become known by many as the artist’s philosopher.

considering the view of Friedrich Nietzsche, a philosopher who notably followed in Schopenhauer’s footsteps, the endless cycle of desire and dissatisfaction caused by the Will is actually a good thing that we can use as fuel toward the process of self-overcoming and growth, from which we can then distill life’s meaning.

One trait these stories do all seem to have in common, though, is a refusal to stop, a refusal to budge from pursuing and defending a vision of the world as one sees it.

Schopenhauer’s work has influenced artists like Richard Wagner and Gustav Mahler, writers like Marcel Proust, Leo Tolstoy, and Samuel Beckett, and thinkers like Friedrich Nietzsche, Sigmund Freud, and Ludwig Wittgenstein,

Nietzsche was born in 1844 in Saxony, Prussia,

In The Gay Science Nietzsche wrote: God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives . . . Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must we ourselves not become gods simply to appear worthy of it?

“There are no facts, only interpretations,”

sort of truth with a capital T, and suggested that all attempts to find one were woefully misguided and actually the source of disconnection preventing modern man from rediscovering any meaning in life.

Nietzsche would direct his attention primarily to the arts and humanities, believing that creative acts and experiences like music, philosophy, literature, theater, and so on could be used as essential means to communicate deeper truths and fill the void of higher connection and meaning.

he would turn his attention toward creating a philosophy that detached the individual from dependence on any collective experience or cultural mechanisms, and rather, focused on the individual pursuit of creative expression and subjective greatness, placing the creation of meaning squarely in the hands of the individual.

the Übermensch, or overman, which he would first introduce in his book Thus Spoke Zarathustra. The overman is described as a sort of defiant, confident, independent individual who pursues their personal desires with vigor and dignifies their independent beliefs unapologetically; someone who deviates from the collective, exhibits strategic selfishness, and acts with aggressiveness and grandiosity.

The desire and striving toward the ideal of the overman serves as perpetual fuel for this process of self-growth as one works through a continuous cycle of self-dissatisfaction, self-improvement, and self-rediscovery, over and over.

self-overcoming, is fundamental to answering and resolving the problem of meaning and value in life.

“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.

“The meaninglessness of suffering, not suffering itself, was the curse that lay over mankind so far,” Nietzsche wrote.

in 1900, Nietzsche died

if someone sees life as negative or meaningless, how can they create goals that have any purpose?

phrase amor fati is Latin for love of one’s fate.

For Nietzsche, when referring to amor fati, he is arguably talking generally about the loving of one’s life.

it connotes an almost enthusiastic and total adoration.

Nietzsche described it in this way: My formula for greatness in a human being is amor fati: that one wants nothing to be different, not forward, not backward, not in all eternity. Not merely bear what is necessary, still less conceal it . . . but love it.