There’s no such thing as a happy nihilist

Periodically I read about nihilism being a happy philosophy of life. Here’s why it ain’t.

Friedrich Nietzsche, not a happy nihilist, Wikimedia.

Nihilism is the notion that nothing matters in life because there is no cosmic meaning to be found. The latter statement is a good corrective for the billions of people who insist that such meaning is available, usually provided by the existence of a God that they worship—a most undignified action for any human being, in my opinion. But as soon as we try to move from the salutary destructive effect of nihilism to any kind of positive, let alone “happy,” version of it, philosophical and existential troubles ensue.

And yet, Melbourne-based journalist Wendy Syfret, author The Sunny Nihilist: How a Meaningless Life Can Make You Truly Happy, insists that nihilism is a positive philosophy of life, for example in an essay published in Psyche. Let’s take a look.

Syfret’s starting point is one that I share: nowadays we are constantly pushed to find meaning in everything we do, which has led to the creation of a large market for books, podcasts, and TED talks that claim to provide you with reliable shortcuts to a happy life. It is, as she says, exhausting:

“Increasingly, aspirations are higher. A chocolate bar isn’t skim milk powder and sugar, it’s a chance to create an intergenerational family moment. A lipstick isn’t a bullet of color to light up a drawn face, but a weapon of radical self-expression.”

She claims that this obsessive quest for meaning is the cause for the commonality of modern existential malaise. But that, arguably, gets things exactly wrong. I should think that things are rather the other way around: the growing industry founded on the quest for meaning is a response to, not a cause of, the dissatisfaction that many feel about contemporary life.

Whatever the question, the real answer, Syfret tells us, lies in embracing pointless, nihilistic chaos. According to the author, nihilism is rooted in the realization that every conceivable source of purpose—including religion, politics, family, all the way to the very notion of truth itself—are arbitrary human constructs. As her favorite nihilist, Nietzsche, summarized it: “Every belief, every considering something true, is necessarily false because there is simply no true world.”