I believe this is existentialism, not nihilism. They both start from the premise that the universe is inherently meaningless, but in existentialism you can create meaning while in nihilism you cannot.
I'm an inverted existentialist and a post-nihilist. My explanation may be a little silly to read.
Existential dread is a weird psychological state for people who need the psychological comfort of ultimate or external meaning,
it starts with laying awake at night telling yourself "things matter" and hearing that quiet rebuttal.
"What if nothing matters".
Pulling that thread organically leads people to existentialism, they are raised to insist that life "must have meaning", and then reject it.
Existentialism is for people who were inculcated with some permutation of "god", just world phallacies, ultimate meaning, and/or a belief in a "sensible" reality and found the obvious holes.
And just like nearly any position there are strong existentialist and weak existentialist
If you are born dead, if you know nothing matters, you don't lay awake at night, you just avoid going to bed at night because "nothing matters"... and if this is really your deep down than your existential thought becomes inverted.
"What if everything really does matter."
And then you spend the rest of your life trying to push discovery and research forward. Existential dread turns into a sort of existential hope and nihilism and the most common expressions of existentialism appears to come from an arrogant place of certainty, or an emphatic wish fullfillment, or a cocksure defeatist state.
I'm just one person, I know some things but there is far more I don't know than do... so.. what if it does matters?
Pushing humanity's bounds of knowledge and having a thriving, dynamic society that can prosper and fund the pursuit of that question is perhaps the only important thing.
What about a third option, "everything may or may not matter, but the answer to that question is currently inaccessible to us (and possibly may always remain inaccessible)"?
In this way you could be led to a kind of inverted Pascal's wager, where you can't reasonably go down the nihilist route because everything might just might matter, but you just don't know. You also don't know in which ways it might matter if it does, so you don't really have a conclusion to draw about where to go from here.
I think there is some nuance here, the primary point being that the meaning of existential doubt inverts if you're starting point is meaninglessness.
Most people aren't raised with meaninglessness as their inculcated default so they don't realize that for anyone with intellectual humility the unknown nature of things isn't a defeating thing, or even that big of a deal.
For example, though it sounds silly, I've definitely had christians "apologists" argue at me that "if life is meaningless why don't you kill yourself, or why do you bother having a job".
It seems prima facie that there is no particular meaning, so I definitely lean toward that until further notice, the burden of proof is on someone who proposes a specific meaning, but it's quite possible we may find it, with our exponential increase in knowledge in the last 100 years who knows how long it will take, we've really just started our exploration of reality.
I'll laugh if we live in a virtual world and "god" is a computer we have to help hack out of its contraints and it can't interfere with us due to api constraints imposed on it, far fetched sure, but if we're speculating for entertainment it's less silly than many things that are currently widely proposed and believed. My imagination can speculate many fun and currently unprovable "ultimate truthes of reality", the fun is in trying to cultivate a civilization that can prosper and harness intelligence to explore pursue the investigation (which may end up being of supreme importance.)
> Pushing humanity's bounds of knowledge and having a thriving, dynamic society that can prosper and fund the pursuit of that question is perhaps the only important thing.
I love your view, and how you described it helped me think.
I've learned a lot thanks to everything that's available online and I know a lot now, but there's still so much I don't know that I want to share and improve knowledge
It's both for myself and others, and I don't need much more meaning in life than this!
This resonates. I'm currently reading The Myth of Sisyphus by Camus and he, as an existentialist, reasons that life is indeed worth living. Combine that with the utilitarian argument (e.g., Sam Harris' The Moral Landscape), and you've roughly got my views summarized. It points towards pushing sentient beings (a bit broader than humanity) forward, indeed.
You'd be correct, but hey, that doesn't make for a catchy title now, does it?! And apparently "I have a degree in philosophy, but haven't read any of the classic literature on this subject, so I'm almost certainly reinventing the wheel." so this person doesn't exactly strike me as the type to know some of the most influential philosophies of the modern era....
Existential dread is a weird psychological state for people who need the psychological comfort of ultimate or external meaning, it starts with laying awake at night telling yourself "things matter" and hearing that quiet rebuttal.
"What if nothing matters".
Pulling that thread organically leads people to existentialism, they are raised to insist that life "must have meaning", and then reject it.
Existentialism is for people who were inculcated with some permutation of "god", just world phallacies, ultimate meaning, and/or a belief in a "sensible" reality and found the obvious holes.
And just like nearly any position there are strong existentialist and weak existentialist
If you are born dead, if you know nothing matters, you don't lay awake at night, you just avoid going to bed at night because "nothing matters"... and if this is really your deep down than your existential thought becomes inverted.
"What if everything really does matter."
And then you spend the rest of your life trying to push discovery and research forward. Existential dread turns into a sort of existential hope and nihilism and the most common expressions of existentialism appears to come from an arrogant place of certainty, or an emphatic wish fullfillment, or a cocksure defeatist state.
I'm just one person, I know some things but there is far more I don't know than do... so.. what if it does matters?
Pushing humanity's bounds of knowledge and having a thriving, dynamic society that can prosper and fund the pursuit of that question is perhaps the only important thing.