Navigating Nihilism: Finding Meaning in the Face of Despair

Nietzsche condemned anyone offering ‘answers’ or ‘solace’ – but engaging with nihilism can teach us to face the discomfort of a potentially meaningless existence.

A trick I developed in the late stages of my first pregnancy to forestall inquiries, concern, recommendations and advice about having a baby was to refer to her impending birth as “the apocalypse”. “I don’t know,” I’d shrug. “We’ll see what things look like after the apocalypse.” It was an effective strategy – there is not much advice you can give to a woman, after all, who is explicitly planning to navigate motherhood like a nuclear fallout.

I was suspicious, even cynical, about what the world insisted was vital to the life of my unborn child. I was partly sceptical because so much of the advice I was getting was contradictory. But I was also suspicious because I’d spent most of my 20s reading Nietzsche.

Nietzsche is not, perhaps, a natural choice for a young mother. But he helps to fuel certain questions about values, and purpose, that are central to questions of care. I found myself reaching for him again, years later, when both of my children were in primary school. I wanted help navigating the tension between the profound responsibilities we have to those we love and are bound to care for, and a fervent desire for freedom, adventure and new experiences.

Nietzsche, and nihilism, are not natural places to go for answers to these sorts of questions. I know that. Nihilism is famously the philosophy that “nothing matters” – it is associated with anarchy, hedonism and those arseholes in The Big Lebowski. But with Nietzsche, nihilism doesn’t function as a bullshit shortcut to eschewing responsibility, or a ticket to hedonistic self-indulgence. Nihilism functions first as a diagnosis, then a reckoning, then a prompt.

What Nietzsche offers is a way of asking what exactly matters – and what if what matters is very, very different from what we have been raised to believe matters. If we allow that to be true – that what actually matters might be different from what we thought matters – how might we ascertain what truly matters? What might allow us to step outside of ourselves and our social conditioning to access the necessary perspective to establish our own sense of value, purpose and meaning in life – if that is even possible?

Nietzsche is fierce in his condemnation of anyone offering “answers”, “solace” or “escape”. He is brutal in his indictment of organised religion and scathing about his fellow philosophers who claim to have “solved” the riddle of life. He doesn’t agree with belief systems, easy answers or lazy escapism. A reader going to Nietzsche with questions only returns with more questions.

Once you have embarked on this journey, you may find you can no longer believe in any objective truth, purpose or meaningful existence. And so the next natural question becomes: how might you withstand that discomfort? How do you sit in that despair, without giving in, or giving up? Is it possible to pursue joy, good health, connection, love and purpose without collapsing into a negative spiral of cynicism, pessimism and scepticism? Can we be sceptical, pessimistic, cynical, even nihilistic, and still get up and make the school lunches, laugh at our children’s stories about their relief teacher, visit our mother in hospital and brush her hair?

Because I was particularly interested in the idea of art as a response to nihilistic thinking, I read the work of many artists who were interested in nihilism, including Samuel Beckett and Albert Camus, who grappled with these questions in their lives and literature. But so often, I found myself thinking of Dolly Parton, and the story of a night when she wrote not just one, but two hit songs.

She had gained a lot of weight, she says, and she was on a liquid diet. The liquid protein was disgusting, and she was supposed to drink it three times a day. One night, she was at a hotel that had “these great fried clams” that she loved: The band was down there in the restaurant. I could hear them laughing and talking. I was in my room, because I couldn’t go down there and eat. I remember just feeling so sorry for myself in this lonely-ass room while they were having a party. I thought, “Well, I can’t eat. I can’t just sit here and feel sorry for myself. Why don’t I just write a song?

Parton is not a nihilist, but if nihilism is believing that life is a “lonely-ass room”, and if we come to believe that we “can’t just sit here and feel sorry” for ourselves, there’s something refreshing about her seemingly simple, playful refusal to engage in that despair, and to just make something new.

Engaging in nihilistic thought experiments doesn’t have to mean mooning around feeling tortured and writing poems about the futility of life. For me, it means making the daily commitment to having the courage to question what is touted as meaningful, trying to face the discomfort of a potentially meaningless existence, and to persist in showing up, and in making things, in spite of discomfort and despair.

Nihilism is boring if the thinking stops at the point where we accept that there is no meaning to life. I’m interested in the next point. What we do in the face of despair. What we make, even if nothing we make matters. What we do, even if nothing we do matters.