Progress is nihilistic because the society lives for the future and not the present. They focus all their energy not in the magnificence of existence but on the development of technology and science to achieve a narrower viewed, easier world in which to live. But what is the point? This is intrinsically senseless, an aberration of human instincts.
Progress also is what causes exhaustion in a society with all the overwork, sympathetic attitudes and moralistic values. This exhaustion ends up in nihilism, and to escape this exhaustion they keep progress as a high ideal. This works as a cycle basically.
It is funny how we all want to be important, we all want to be of some value. But this longing for value is irrelevant, because man has no value, and nothing you’ll do will matter in the end, because death annihilates all things done in the world.
Attachment to form will always lead to unpleasant states, because of the reality of impermanence. Everything will eventually fall apart, every action, every word will be lost in nothingness, the entropy of the universe will always be increasing creating more and more disorder (Second Law of Thermodynamics).
In life, you can either be hedonistic, attaching to form and pleasures so you can forget your human suffering (but will lead to suffering because of attachment), or you can be an ascetic limiting yourself of pleasure and desires so you can avoid further suffering. Both are avoidance of suffering in the end, as well as the Buddhism’s ”middle way” that sets the hypothesis of avoiding both asceticism and hedonism, by eliminating attachment, craving and becoming, putting the senses to sleep, to me this is more like being in a coma or vegetative state, life denying. So, if you want to live fully you must sign the contract of suffering and experience this remarkably absurd reality.
Philosophies with the highest truths, in order (by personal opinion):
1) Avaita Vendanta
2) Zen Buddhism
3) Existential Nihilism
4) Stoicism
5) Possibilianism
6) Taoism
Best Sciences:
1) Neuroscience
2) Psychology
3) Anthropology and Evolution
4) Cosmology
5) Quantum Physics
What is a belief? How does it originate? Every belief is a considering-something-true.
The most extreme form of nihilism would be the view that every belief, every considering-something-true, is necessarily false cause there simply is no true world. Thus, a perspectival appearance whose origin lies in us (in so far as we continually need a narrower, abbreviated, simplified world).
-That it is the measure of strength to what extent we can admit to ourselves, without perishing, the merely apparent character, the necessity of lies.
To this extent, nihilism, as the denial of a truthful world, of being, might be a divine way of thinking.
- Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will To Power (June 10, 1887)
That human life must be some kind of mistake is sufficiently proved by the simple observation that man is a compound of needs which are hard to satisfy; that their satisfaction achieves nothing but a painless condition in which he is only given over to boredom; and that boredom is a direct proof that existence is in itself valueless, for boredom is nothing other than the sensation of the emptiness of existence.
We complain of the darkness in which we live out our lives; we do not understand the nature of existence in general; we especially do not know the relation of our own self to the rest of existence. Not only is our life short, our knowledge is limited entirely to it, since we can see neither back before our birth nor out beyond our death, so that our consciousness is as it were a lightning-flash momentarily illuminating the night….
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