It's all meaningless, isn't it?

Everything matters until it doesn't.

Photograph by Lucas Pezeta

So much trouble, so many problems, such plentiful emotions. But in the end, it truly doesn’t matter, does it? Everything politicians say and do, all those wars in distant and not-so-distant regions, economies and games, politics and bullshit, corporations and nations, even all those daily worries and anxieties, they all will vanish some lucky day. They will cease to matter entirely, disappearing into the void as everything else does. It will be glorious and it will not be dark, it will just be nothing and you will realize nothing for there will be nothing left to do the thinking.

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Perhaps it was indeed, as Thomas Ligotti says, humanity’s greatest mistake to “realize,” to acknowledge, to become conscious. The first thought was the most terrible. It doomed billions upon billions to an existence of constant dread. What is there, in the end?

And so we began to imagine, to wonder what lay beyond the observable. And so we began to make churches and, after that was done, institutions became the next logical step. And we put so much importance and authority into these imaginary things that they become our reality. And we keep forgetting that all those were born merely out of fear. Fear of the unknowable. Fear of pain. And these two forces fueled all of history. Animals live in the moment, but we have lost that ability. Yet we are animals, still. Consciousness became our curse and at the same time provided us with unimaginable comfort.

Nevertheless, everything we do, everything we think about is an expression of that ancient anxiety. Avoid pain, avoid what is unimaginable. What we think about in our daily lives is an atrocity of futility. How do I look? Does Betty like me? Have I embarrassed myself again? Who will win the next elections? How is it that so little is the number of people thinking about real things?

I get many comments on both the Substack here and on YouTube saying that they like my essays because they appear more real, more authentic, more a realistic depiction of life as it is without all the illusions, unquestioned group-think, all the abstract layers upon layers that somehow have become more important to us than reality. I do not understand such comments. How is it that a guy just writing about things as he sees them is remarkable in any way?

We live on a pyramid of nonsense, only ever seeing the very top and nothing of what lies beneath (the pavement). I must admit that I do sometimes question my own sanity as well as the sanity of others. Intersubjective realities have come to dominate our lives while truth withers away. But no matter, truth wins in the end. Upon death at the latest.

When money becomes meaningless, when nations and governments crumble, when institutions vanish, truth will remain. And the truth is: nothing matters.

How much do politicians’ decisions truly affect your life? How much? On average, not much. Some people will be affected by individual decisions but the vast, vast majority will not. That is not to say that such things are unimportant. They are just far less important than the attention they demand suggests. All that energy, all that brain capacity, all that stress would be far more usefully employed for things that truly matter.

So what matters? Nothing, right? That is just the logical conclusion which, somehow, is false. It will all crumble to dust some day but that does not make our lives less important. The absence of any sort of afterlife does not necessitate the assertion that lives are unimportant. On the contrary. Our brief existences before nothing prevails, before the last star burns out, before the last black hole radiates away, make them all the more important. Our lifetimes would be more wisely spent on experience, which is found in other people, novelty, and purpose. The latter in particular will not matter in the end, but only on a scale of truth. Our subjective lives are not related to truth.

Think. You have such a brief life and you spend it on… this? Working that job, buying those things, worrying about useless things. What drives you? What motivates you to do such a hilariously dumb thing? Comfort. Comfort is all it is. What is comfort? It is the absence of pain.

That is true of all of us.

The logical thing to do would be to make a society that maximizes meaning. That follows naturally from the assertion that after life there is nothing nor will there ever be again. This is, however, my assertion and you may not agree. Instead, we have built a society that maximizes comfort, but even that merely for certain parts of humanity. That is probably the realistic thing to do as we are animals and animals always, always seek to avoid pain and danger, also at the cost of other animals. The wolf father eating his cubs is the logical thing to do for him for the wolf does not know of intersubjective realities.

In essence, there are two layers of reality to unpack here. On the one, we have the almost certainty that absolutely nothing matters in the end. This is necessitated by the fact that death exists. And on the other, we have our lives. The things we do do not matter, on an existential, universal level, but they do matter to us. Is there a difference between those two things? That depends on whether you hold true the assertion that there exists an objective reality.

When you write emails in that absurd abstraction of an abstraction that is the office, for example, that specific email, for a brief moment, becomes your world. In that moment, it is all that matters. Only afterward—minutes, days, years, decades later—do you realize its triviality. When you die, that exact thing happens to literally everything.

But before death, there is life. Many people have struggled with this bipolarity. It even has its own terms: existentialism and absurdism. There are significant differences between these two, but they essentially deal with the same thing: how do we make life matter in the knowledge that it doesn’t?

Solutions may vary between users. The most common one: shove away the truth, ignore it, bury it beneath all the layers. Another, for me more realistic one: acknowledge the truth and choose to ignore it for the most part. There is a stark difference between these two. One is an ancient instinct, the other a conscious decision. Does it matter? In the end, no, of course. To me, it does matter in the sense that it provides my life with more meaning instead of less.

Let’s imagine we knew for a fact that there is actually an afterlife. Afterlife is for all eternity, right? So the importance of your life converges toward zero to remain there, after a while, forever. 80 years or so are literally nothing compared to infinity. So life doesn’t matter even if there was an afterlife.

We had to solve that problem too, so we imagined that we would be granted that eternal bliss solely on the basis of our adherence to specific rules during our lifetimes. The labyrinths our brains navigate to avoid the truth are astonishing. Either God is a narcissistic madman or he doesn’t exist. Both options are terrifying. And so we do not think about either.

Isn’t it a glorious thought to believe that there will be no one to judge you? No one to forever remember all those ugly things you did. All those embarrassments and inadequacies, all those mistakes. All those traumas. To just start anew, not bound to anything, be free, be meaningless, be nothing. To me, that is a comforting thought. Paradise sounds as terrifying as hell. I would rather not exist. But, before, I will live. Whatever that means.

What is the point of this essay? There is none. Make your own.

This was weird, right?

Antonio

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