Nihilism
Nihilism. The word that brings shivers in me.
At this point, I am confused about what life is about. What should I be motivated about?
I find no meaning in anything.
Why should I do a job? Why should I earn money? All these basically seem to serve some pointless purposes... To have a good life, where I can survive, and create a tiny world around me which will facilitate survival for a few other people as well. Is survival the goal of life? Then I should nurture kids for doing the same thing? And they do the same thing again with their kids? So that this continues endlessly?
There is of course no point in this.
Then all the other purposes of life appear pointless as well. Enjoying yourself and being happy are pointless since we are ourselves temporary, and hence whether we are happy or sad doesnt really matter. To create meaning, we try to impact things which are outside ourselves, and hope that those impacts last longer than our own life times, and yes, many of us manage to do that - whether by leaving a child behind, or a building, or a company, or some money to the charitable organization, or some new idea, or some new organization, or some positive impact to a lot of people. But what have we got by changing our impact time from less than a century to one-and-a-half centuries? Or to two centuries? Is this the purpose of life? To change our impact to the world, and thus our meaning, to about a century or two?
Following religion and sustaining culture are pointless. Sustaining name and fame of the family are obviously pointless.
Most of everything is pointless.
Becoming very successsful is pointless, since success doesn correlate linearly with happiness. Is Bill Gates the happiest man in the world? Sometimes, I feel that some people working in cafe's might be some of the happiest...What I mean is, ofcourse, that being rich is not a necessary and not a sufficient condition for happiness, though having a basic level of money might be necessary to satisfy the biological beast within us.
Ofcourse, if we assume that fulfilling our biological goals (of survival and reproduction of ourself and of this and other species) is "the Moral Right", then we can put some purpose into all this.
Of course, this is just an assumption... but it works in a limited way.
Though, with our brain, we as a species have gone beyond that.
We found that we were fighting against each other for survival, and we were having lot of emotional/mental/physical suffering in doing this.
And with just survival as a goal, the consciousness in our mind did not want to accept the fact that its only purpose was to help the organism live and that that was the reason for its evolution. This refusal to accept made us seek more abstract, absolute and permanent goals.
We developed the concepts of God, meditation, faith, etc.
Interestingly, the concept of God, in some ways of looking at it, brings with it both absolutism and nihilism. Trying to concentrate on the specious, non-present God declaring all normal survival-based, ego-based life as materialistic, basically is nihilistic since the attempt to use faith as nihilism nullifier seems obvious.
(incomplete)