First Thoughts on Nihilism

Everybody having a fixed set of masks

I have thought deeply about how we define things, how we got different identities the moment we were born, without ever searching for them ourselves.

I always wonder about a world where everybody has a fixed set of masks, inherited from their childhood, given to them by their parents to have some kind of identity.

Are we really creating an identity crisis for ourselves?

Everybody follows something. Everybody has a mask. Every other philosophy that got converted into a religion created a concept called God, a separate being that exists somewhere else, and we need to get liberated and achieve that place to find them, and we need to be something, something like this that everybody keeps talking about.

But when we really see the world, when we really experience it, we never saw any power that actually exists outside our own inner self. We don't even know what we really are. You are talking to yourself inside, but whom are you talking to? You don't know.

But you're still out there finding an identity crisis, like:

• "I have this purpose in life"
• "I need to do something like this"
• "I need to get liberated"
• "I need moksha (liberation)"
• "I need to be like this"

There is punya (merit) and paapa (sin). So many concepts like this exist.

Nihilism

But nihilism is a concept I admire the most. Nietzsche, the person behind it, came from a normal background. He saw everything the way we see it now, so many catastrophic disasters happening in this world, and we never actually heard anything from a concept called God coming from somewhere else. Nobody has ever witnessed something like that actually happen in life, rather than its existence in scriptures and stories. Everybody has their own way of exploring life.

Nihilism is closely related to existentialism, that we don't really have any purpose in life. We must do what we actually want to do, rather than live by a tag given to us by somebody else, an identity like "you are someone," without you even knowing who you actually are. That is bad.

This philosophy is great because it really clears a layman's mind to understand the actual things in his life, rather than sticking to a fixed set of beliefs he thinks are ultimate, instead of exploring things for himself.

Good, bad, evil, strong, weak

Nihilism also has a good concept in how we define so many things in life, like good, bad, evil, strong, weak.

Take the ultimate reality — say a fox attacking a rabbit. We easily assume the rabbit is good and the fox is evil, but in reality it's completely different, it's just a weak and strong game.

We have a fixed set of beliefs we hold onto. For example, doing robbery is a wrong thing. But the person doing the robbery also has a family to feed. Feeding a family is a great thing, so how come the same act is wrong in one case and great in the other?

We have so many confusions like this around us, and with a fixed set of beliefs, we can't actually define these things clearly.

Nihilism talks about all of this. There is no meaningful meaning for anything. Everybody has their own perspective on explaining these words, on how much meaning they think something has.

I feel like

I feel nihilism is a good concept for ignoring all the stupid beliefs people possess and instead understanding yourself.

There is no ultimate meaning. You need to create something. That is why you actually exist in this world.

We all just Dust

That's my thoughts on nihilism.