Life after Nihilism
I've spent a bit over a decade trying to transcend nihilism using the Nietzschean method. This is the antithesis of the Buddhist or ascetic method. Humans desire being: they want a stable identity, a sense of transcendental purpose, and serious values. Nihilism undermines this desire because it drives home the reality that the universe is devoid of purpose, has no normative order and that consciousness means we are always becoming and can never have an 'equilibrium' identity. Rather, we make incremental steps towards one. The ascetic ideal suggests either:
In the Christian tradition: the desire for individuation that is inherent in the yearning for being is basically temptation, i.e. Satanic, and the best thing to do is to humble yourself before God and accept your place in his plan, which ironically gets you identity, purpose and serious values.
In the Buddhist tradition: individuation and the self more generally is a trap. It is a wrong road and we must walk back to the beginning. Mindfulness and meditation allow you to take control of consciousness and use that control to annihilate the self, leading to nirvana.
The ascetic ideal seems shit to me. Life is great. I don't care that it has some downs. I don't even care that it is ultimately meaningless and largely absurd. The main thing that bothers me about it is just how short it is. A thousand years would be nice. I want more life!
All my philosophising has gotten me to the point where Nihilism doesn't bite me quite like it used to, but I'm still devoid of any sustained motivation. There are things that I care about and can do with enthusiasm most of the time, but I regularly get bored (ennui) with them, and only slightly less regularly reflect on the fact that they're rather meaningless in the grand scheme of things. Certainly my contribution to them is basically pointless.
It's hard to stick with something in contemporary society because the grind is so intense.
My basic approach to life nowadays is just to follow whatever I find intrinsically motivating at the present point in time. This means that I bounce around a lot. Sometimes I'll just want to focus on my hobbies for a month. Other times I'll get really carried away with teaching (incidentally, teaching is one of the few things that I have a sustained passion for), or exercise, or reading, or writing. Sometimes I just want to bugger off into the mountains for a fortnight.
This is quite a change for me. 5 years ago I was totally obsessed with two things: fulfilling my potential and not having any regrets when I was dying. Nowadays I'm much less confident that my potential is any specific thing, and the main thing I imagine regretting is doing stuff I didn't want to do. Working for deferred rewards is fine if you have some idea of what those rewards are (like working as a lawyer for 30 years because you know you can then be a judge and that's what you really want). I've got NFI where I want to end up, so summoning the motivation to stay on the grind is tough.
I'm getting really anxious about having to go into the "real world" and the join the 50 hour a week workforce because my productivity just doesn't follow those patterns and I'm going to get really depressed having to go against my motivations all the time.
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