Nonexistent

I’m usually wary of epiphanies, lightbulb moments and sweeping realisations that reorder lives. But walking home one evening earlier this year, my existence shifted with a single passing thought.

I was chronically stressed at work, overwhelmed by expectations, grasping for a sense of achievement or greater purpose and tip-toeing towards full-on exhaustion. Then it hit me: “Who cares? One day I’ll be dead and no one will remember me anyway.”

I can’t explain the crashing sense of relief. It was as if my body dumped its cortisol stores allowing my lungs to fully inflate for the first time in months. Standing on the side of the road I looked at the sky and thought: “I’m just a chunk of meat hurtling through space on a rock. Pointless, futile, meaningless.” It was one of the most comforting revelations of my life. I’d discovered nihilism.


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Nihilism has existed in one form or another for hundreds of years, but is usually associated with Friedrich Nietzsche, the 19th century German philosopher (and pessimist of choice for high school kids with undercuts) who proposed that existence is meaningless, moral codes worthless, and God is dead.

This decade it’s had a cultural comeback. Visiting the central tenets it’s easy to see why. Nietzsche’s argument that “Every belief, every considering something true, is necessarily false because there is simply no true world” feels chillingly relevant as we stumble through a “post-truth” reality.