Nihilism

Over recent years I have been struggling with nihilism. The whole idea that it is all pointless and nothing we can do has any significance in even a moderately short term. Religious friends may rejoice in this revelation, hoping to show me that only Christ or Allah can bestow meaning in human life. But, I would have to reject that on the grounds that it is still pointless and even if I could be fooled into thinking there was meaning, reality wouldn't change, just my mind.

If I live my life so that I will be remembered fondly, so what? Would that help me or anyone else in any way? Even if it did help someone, their life is as pointless as mine. Consider my grandfather, my mother's father. All accounts of him were negative, with the exception of mine. Granma didn't like him, and complained relentlessly about him, All I have are his letters and a few memories, add that to the few people who do remember him and you don't get much. If we go one generation back all we have is a name, occupation and a few administrative details about his life. Further back than that and even less is known. So the chances of this generation just ending up as a few computer files is pretty good.

When you add to this a basic understanding of the scale of the solar system and its place in the universe, things get even bleaker. We comprehend distances down to about a millimetre and up to a few hundred kilometres quite well, any smaller or larger and we run into trouble. Can anyone really imagine something 10,000 k square and then make a meaningful comparison with something three k bigger? No. Evolution has given us the tools to survive, and that stuff wasn't necessary. We can get from Australia to London in about 22 hours flying a modern 747.

In the same machine, if it could do it, would take almost a month of continuous flight to get to the moon. Our other planets are so far away that analogies like this are pointless. And our solar system is one of billions in the milky way and trillions upon trillions in the universe. Our speck of dust is microscopically insignificant.

Tomorrow I will tell you what dragged me out of this black hole of nothingness.