Tell HN: People get the wrong idea about Nihilism | Hacker News Reader

Tell HN: People get the wrong idea about Nihilism

1 pointinc0gnit01 comment

I've seen many people (online and IRL) who believe in the concept that "nothing matters". What people get from Nihilism is that there's no point in doing anything because nothing matters in the end. After you die, a few people will remember you. But they will die themselves soon enough, and the memory of your existence will pretty much be gone forever. It's not as if future people will ever be interested in your life. You and all records of you will just fade away. Even if you made a giant impact, soon enough, the world will be hit by an asteroid, or a plague, massive climate change, or some other great disaster. Even if we manage to avoid that, in a cosmic eyeblink, the Sun will die.

Nothing matters in the end, and everything will indeed end. But it's also true that things matter for X duration of time. The painkiller you take when in extreme pain matters to you because it eases your pain. The warm clothes you wear in winter matter because they give you comfort. Working on your physical health, financial condition, etc., is going to matter for the next couple of decades (the rest of your life). All I want to say is things matter for X duration of time.

I've had this discussion with people before, the best answer I've come up with is this:

Nihilism is less the idea that all things are irrelevant or immaterial but rather that there is no universal valuation to things. What we do may not affect a universal scale observer or tautologically "matter" in some sense but there exists some scale or model under which things have some valuation.

The trick then becomes rather than conform to some agreed scale or model of the universe for the moral or value derivative we instead turn to what we have decided is valuable.

If I am cold is irrelevant to the universe, but it is relevant to me, and as such being cold may only last a short time and can be survived but it still matters to me.

Equally there is no universal sense of being moral, there is however my sense of being moral and as such some actions can be good not by being derived from some universal morals but instead by my own definitions. "Being kind to a stranger" is moral to me in line with my definitions, but "not eating fish on Fridays" has no moral definition within my moral declaration so I can eat fish on Fridays without being immoral.

Nihilism isn't an end, it's the start to a personal conversation on values that are specific to you and become meaningful to you by your understanding of their worth. Once you have defined your values independent of some larger prescriptive whole you have a system you actually understand and can defend the merits of, a much stronger core for reasoning about morality and the goodness of your actions.

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