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

by Robert Pantano

earnestness of writers and thinkers providing me with a feeling of mutual respect and understanding because, for the first time, I felt I was being offered attempts at truth that were closer to my experience of life. They were bold, direct, and unwavering.

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

This feeling of awe is immensely liberating and provoking. It reminds us that we stand at the crossroads of the infinite and the finite, everything and nothing, knowledge and unawareness.

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,”

“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,”

As 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.

The philosophy of Stoicism suggests that the universe is indifferent to what we want from it. Buddhism says that life is suffering. Existentialism and Absurdism say that we are stricken by our need for meaning in a life that is inherently meaningless.

one of history’s greatest minds shut down for asking too many questions about a world that was not yet ready to admit it was still at the starting line.

you coax your mind from its wandering and keep to the original oneness? . . . Can you cleanse your inner vision until you see nothing but the light? Can you love people and lead them without imposing your will? Can you deal with the most vital matters by letting events take their course? Can you step back from your own mind and thus, understand all things? . . . This is the supreme virtue.

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.

The closest thing to absolute existential freedom, it seems, is freedom from freedom itself—freedom from the constraints that the concept of freedom imposes.

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. Wealth, materialistic abundance, fame, and power have no value in a happy life if the person who possesses them has not yet learned to live properly without them.

“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.” In the Stoic view, the things we often find ourselves chasing in life reveal themselves to be rather petty and meaningless from a sufficient distance. We don’t have much, if any, control over what happens to us, how people see and treat us, or what happens because of 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

This, although bleak, is worth often considering because the likely fact is that if everyone who was going to lose their life in the next couple of years knew they would, most of those people would live differently. And thus, 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 in such a case can the finitude of life begin to reveal itself.

manage this balance between now and later is perhaps one of the greatest challenges the human mind is faced with.

enjoying any wealth and fortune that might come of them, but not work for the purpose of social status or material success beyond one’s minimal needs, because beyond almost everything else, he argued for allocating as much time as possible to leisure—more specifically, a particular type of well-focused leisure in which one finds tranquility, introspection, and stillness.

by pointing to the value in the difficulties and sufferings of life, not by denying them, but rather, by accepting and facing up to them.

The point is that, like the yeast cells, 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.

At first, this idea of not knowing what we are all doing might make things feel absurd and meaningless, and that’s fair. However, the following step is to realize that this permits us to no longer be subservient to some specific grand meaning or template of life, that we don’t have to discover or join in on someone else’s ultimate answer or way of living, nor should we live in hopes of some future ideal or afterlife. Rather, we should attempt to follow our own barometers of meaning and believe in the only thing we have any evidence to believe in at all: ourselves and our relationship with this little sliver of time and space.

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.

These concepts, along with others unmentioned, suggest that 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. The things we are motivated by, therefore, must not be merely to impress others nor achieve anything according to any societal ideals, because everyone has their own unique, complicated source of motivation that leads to distinctive outputs. There are certainly shared common ideas and ways to approach life that are worth considering, but one must attempt to consider how each of them fit with one’s own self before assuming them.

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.

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 objects outside our mental, phenomenological experience of them. Deviating from Kant, 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 plurality of objects beyond our experience at all.

Essentially, this would lead him to the conclusion that 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 name of his masterwork, The World as Will and Representation. It

but 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. All of the material world operates by and through this Will, moving, striving, consuming, and violently expressing itself in order to sustain itself.

Alternatively, engaging in arts and philosophy, in Schopenhauer’s mind, served as another, more accessible method. He felt that ‘good’ art could provide a source of clarity into the nature and problems of being, without any of the illusion or false decoration.

Nietzsche’s younger brother, Ludwig, also died. This dichotomy of his religious foundation and early exposure to the irreconcilable, reasonless pain and suffering experienced by good, underserving people, would likely lay some of the foundation for what would ultimately become the basis of Nietzsche’s later work.

that there is in fact no universal, objective truth to be known. “There are no facts, only interpretations,”

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.

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?

amor fati.

Alps and was experiencing what one could easily infer to be a period of deep self-reflection over a life that was spiked with hardships and failures. He had fled from his family and career in academia to find independence and pursue freelance writing. However, he could not escape the reverberating negative effects of his family, nor could he find success in his writing. He lost friendships, romances, and soon his mind.

And instead, it is a declaration of love and embrace of all of life exactly how it is, with all the good and the bad, the success and the failure, the satisfaction and the pain. 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.

The true challenge and task of life, for Nietzsche, is to fall in love with what you are actually experiencing right now, as it is, in all the ways it is. He wrote:

Amor fati is a sentiment of willingness to accept at last the way things have gone and will go, to love a life that tries in almost every moment to make you hate it, and to still stare back at it and say yes, I love it. What’s scarier than an opponent who smiles while being beaten?

like despair, suffering, social isolation, absurdity, futility, failure, decay, and death.

The Trouble with Being Born, he discusses how since death necessarily follows from birth, it is actually the memory of our birth that is the tragic problem of life, and not death in and of itself.

When all the current reasons—moral, esthetic, religious, social, and so on—no longer guide one’s life, how can one sustain life without succumbing to nothingness? Only by a connection with the absurd, by love of absolute uselessness, loving something which does not have substance but which simulates an illusion of life. I live because the mountains do not laugh and the worms do not sing.

can those who accept and embrace failure and disaster ever really fail or be struck by either? Pessimism, in this sense, almost serves as a trump card—the last true failure being the failure of optimism. From there, we become, as he put it, “invincible victims.”

and embrace of the sad, hopeless, and absurd parts of life—they serve as enduring and important connection points to these often hidden but deeply shared human experiences, reminding us that we aren’t so alone and reassuring us with the comforting notion that “[We are] simply an accident. Why take it all so seriously?”

In another one of his popular stories, Metamorphosis, the protagonist Gregor Samsa

we are not made with a specific purpose prior to existence, we create our purpose through our existence. In other words, through the choices we make and the actions we take in life, we create who we are and what life means. “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.”

Our life is ultimately our life, and so long as we are not harming others in the process, we must create a life of our own meaning, determining our own objects of importance, committing to their pursuit, and reaping the significance and wonder of life along the way.

evident. If we look, we will always find a reason to regret any decision we make. Move or stay; agree or disagree; take the job or quit; marry or divorce; walk one path or another; in all cases, whatever the choice may be, we will only ever know the outcome of the one we take. And no path that we take will ever ultimately resolve the uncertainty of life.

references the Greek story of Sisyphus as a powerful allegory and teaching to overcome life’s absurdity.

For absolutely no reason, Sisyphus rolls this rock up the hill, only to watch it roll back down, again and again. In this, Camus draws a connection between the tiresome and futile fate of Sisyphus and the human experience. However, Camus wrote, “One must imagine Sisyphus happy.” With this, Camus makes the hopeful yet reasonable assertion that even in the ordinary, repetitive, absurd, and futile experiences of our life, we can and should still find worthy experience and happiness.

“You remember all we were told about the torture-chambers, the fire and brimstone, the “burning marl.” Old wives’ tales! There’s no need for red-hot pokers. Hell is other people!”

but rather, that hell is the imposed state of dependance and modification of one’s self according to the integration, approval, and satisfaction of other people’s perception.

Sartre suggests, we see ourselves by being seen by others, or as Charles Cooley put it, “I am not who you think I am; I am not who I think I am; I am who I think you think I am,” then perhaps we must see how other people see as carefully and as generously as we can.