Joy Is a Tension Between Happiness and Nihilism
I have long held the belief that people need a healthy dose of nihilism to stay grounded. But when you venture too deep into the dark hole, you become the “I’m garbage and the world wouldn’t care if I didn’t exist” type who says that but also imagines what everyone would say at your funeral as you stare at an Instagram pic of your dead cat. Nihilism is as much of a coping mechanism as it is a philosophy. It can be an antidote to all the half-truths and four Pinocchios in the world that would all be laughable if we weren’t so busy devising ways to neutralize one another in their name. In the deepest pits of an eff-it mindset, it’s not hard to find contradictions — you care about everything and nothing all at once.
As metaphysical realizations so often do, this particular epiphany came at a seemingly insignificant moment. It was the conclusion of another unremarkable day in the life of a millennial urbanite. My bedroom faded back while a personal playlist woozily lulled me to sleep, a smooth cocktail of indica and craft beer glided through my veins as I melted into the satin sheets of my bed, belly up, engaged in a telepathic conversation with the ceiling. My mind was a synaptic battlefield. These past few months, I was overcome by what David Foster Wallace calls The Bad Thing, or what I call, a Frankenstein’s monster that was let loose to terrorize the village, made out of my obsession over a variety of outlandish, irrelevant, paranoid concerns.
As I wrestled with the existential, a resignation-themed tune by the philosophically minded Modest Mouse earwormed its way into my thoughts. “Ocean Breathes Salty,” to be specific, a sublime and singular brand of existential folk poetry, psychedelic rock, art-punk, and pastoral Americana. Singer-guitarist Isaac Brock’s desperately uneasy vocals pierced through the fog of my mind’s negativity while the off-kilter arrangements, angular melodies, and powerful dynamic changes washed over me like a gentle tide.
The ocean breathes salty, won’t you carry it in?
In your head, in your mouth, in your soul
And maybe we’ll get lucky and we’ll both grow old
Well I don’t know, I don’t know
I don’t know, I hope so
The worst thing about sinking into a rut is not that you feel like a bunch of things suck simultaneously, but that you’re overcome with a pathological unfeeling that’s not even interesting enough to kill you. If I looked at myself in the mirror, I’d wish that I could split myself in two, just so I could smack myself in the face. This breezy nightmare didn’t have any particular genesis. It was a gradual momentum of exhaustion building and mounting after these supposedly epic milestones: landing the dream job, finishing a work project, earning a master’s… SUCCESS!!
When the intense yearning for a state of completion combines with a tormenting sense that it cannot be achieved, you’re left with an utterly hollow and cynical feeling. Your life becomes a vaudeville Sisyphean horror play that you’re watching from the back wall of the auditorium while the exit sign glows bright and you have one foot extended onto the aisle — but the lead actor’s face isn’t quite punchable enough and their voice isn’t quite grating enough for you to leave just yet. Zoomed in to the small windows of our minds, every little thing matters. Sylvia Plath once wrote, “The loneliness of the soul in its appalling self-consciousness is horrible and overpowering.” The smiles between the raindrops grow less frequent. The despair outweighs the delight. The magical gives way to the mundane.
My life as it’s currently composed would map fairly neat onto a description of the Millennial American Dream™. I’m a relatively privileged white guy in America, healthy, above-average-looking, have a respectable job where I make a modest amount of money, live in a sensible apartment, and I don’t even own a nice car because “what if I need at least $400 for some kind of emergency!?”
And yet, relentless anxiety was gnawing away at me, something that would fall under #FirstWorldProblems. This ubiquitous and annoying meme was designed to make us laugh at the overpowering and deeply unsettling anguish that awaits us at the end of a drive-thru, when you realize you’re stuck with buffalo sauce when you really wanted to dip your McNuggets in sweet and sour. Or, it’s the creeping sense that your mother secretly resents you because she put her modeling career on hold when she accidentally got pregnant with you but now her dreams are dead because she aged into decrepit unfuckability and there’s no one but you to blame for her mediocre life working as a law firm secretary and you’re really not sure how to live with yourself so you spend each night gorging on a pint of Ben & Jerry’s while watching Bachelor In Paradise and wondering why your thunder thighs won’t disappear before crying yourself to sleep.
But this phenomenon belies something more pernicious. If you hate your well-paying job because you feel like it serves no purpose, you’ll always resent your soul-sucking existence, even if you aren’t starving to death. As a copywriter for a PR agency in downtown Chicago, I get to be “creative,” although that’s really marketing-speak for vanishing my personality beneath layers of corporate-imposed universality to help billion-dollar brands create problems that aren’t real so they sell gilded trash to people who don’t need it. My mental gears churn for the majority of my passing days, and when I come home to write for myself, I would have nothing left to say. Night after night, I stared at a flickering cursor on a blank page and a story folder congested with half-baked ideas stalled by flat prose and the dreaded writer’s block.
One look at the stars and imagining the cosmos beyond, and you realize tragedies like these are comically trivial. But when your main source of pleasure is snatched from your arms, you almost experience malnourishment of joy. Then it bleeds into everything else. Do I even have the right to be depressed? Can I ever get my dad bod to look like Leo DiCaprio’s?
No one mortal can swallow the sea. I was overwhelmed with all the devils that reappeared in my patterned dreams. My natural reaction was to stop caring about anything — relinquishing all my fucks — hoping I would find the rainbow locked inside my mind’s swirling tempest. It only entrenched me deeper into the dark hole, The Bad Thing. Mark Manson, in The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck, writes about this phenomenon:
“When most people envision giving no fucks whatsoever, they envision a kind of perfect and serene indifference to everything, a calm that weathers all storms. This is misguided. There’s absolutely nothing admirable or confident about indifference… In fact, indifferent people often attempt to be indifferent because in reality they actually give too many fucks. They are afraid of the world and the repercussions of their own choices. Therefore, they make none. They hide in a grey emotionless pit of their own making, self-absorbed and self-pitied, perpetually distracting themselves from this unfortunate thing demanding their time and energy called life.”
This is no way to live. You can have all the self-awareness and introspection in the world, and while both are helpful, it all means nothing without action. Constant self-criticism in a vacuum makes for some mildly amusing internet fodder, but you won’t be much of a fun person to be around. I didn’t even want to be around me most of the time. I was trapped in a toxic relationship with my couch, sour beer, and pepperoni pizza.
Well, that is that and this is this
Will you tell me what you saw, and I’ll tell you what you missed
When the ocean met the sky
You missed when time and life shook hands and said goodbye
When the Earth folded in on itself
And said “Good luck, for your sake I hope Heaven and Hell
Are really there, but I wouldn’t hold my breath
It is only fitting that Earth, like a dog chasing its tail, floats in a circle around and around until the sun eventually delivers its firey deathblow. Leave it to humans to assign something as arrogant as “purpose” to anything we do. We’re conceited enough to think we have the answers to life’s most ongoing and pressing metaphysical questions, and yet many of us can’t even grasp the concept of Caitlyn Jenner. My issue with unchecked nihilism, though, is its wholesale rejection of all values and constructs. Sure, life is absurd and the world is full of riff-raff, but when you’re trapped in The Bad Thing, you get so caught up with isolating yourself from all forms of purpose that you lose touch with meaning. This lulls you into a zombie-like trance that is antithetical to living.
For Albert Camus, the purpose of philosophy is to confront the inherent absurdity of existence and to overcome it; to create meaning where none otherwise exists. He believed there were three main options for dealing with this sense of existential angst: 1) whole-heartedly embrace some religion; 2) take a suicidal swan dive; 3) flip life the bird and stage an all-out assault on your personal goals. Camus called the last option “radical freedom,” writing that “the only way to deal with an unfree world is to become so absolutely free that your very existence is an act of rebellion.”
In these twisted times, humanity has undergone a radical sea change in values, with every wave eroding Objective Truth with each successive crash. The empty coastline is a negative space. The maps we’ve sketched to navigate the restless, raging ocean are in dire need of a redrawing. Social media has made us all humiliatingly visible, and we can only imagine the worst: that we have lost control over who we are, that other people will see what we see in ourselves — the squirming, icky, insecure mess inside. Our worst fears of a Kafkaesque, Soviet-style dystopia are now a reality: corporate collectivism, pointless jobs, ceaseless advertorial propaganda, power and wealth concentration — the list goes on. Religion, once a haven from existential turmoil, is outdated. Kanye, a newer god, offers less solace.
Everyone confronts the negative space at some point in their lives, where everything solid melts into nothing. We, in all our free-marketeering geniusness, conceive nothingness as having no value. We see the ocean and fill it with garbage. American consumerism peacocks with superficial spectacle, all of it designed to make us uncomfortable with the negative space wrapped around all the joy this world has to offer. Instead, many memorize the script of this badly acted reality TV show, and oftentimes, this set drones on with rehearsal.
In the negative space, happiness comes when we’re ready to receive it — when we’re comfortable with its absence. It’s a blank canvas on which you can paint your own meaning. And this can be a scary, awe-inspiring proposition. Fyodor Dostoevsky, Sigmund Freud, and Frederich Nietzche have all argued that most people are afraid of freedom because it involves personal responsibility; so they defer to conformity. For a while, I was no different. I plunged head-first into nihilism because I was convinced that augmenting my own, and the world’s, shortcomings were enough and that nothing mattered, but it would all work itself out because the universe doesn’t care either way. This mental loop only leads to self-awareness without any accountability. Essentially, I was looking at self-improvement through a window, but I wasn’t taking the measured steps through the door to get me there.
There is no happiness without unbelievable, unprecedented, unstoppable courage. Courage entails challenging yourself to better yourself, to do good, to take risks, to cut against the grain. It is a concord between your spirit and your deeds. Like a sudden burst of creative madness, happiness spontaneously erupts when we create the optimal conditions for it to happen — when we’re mindful and attune to the moment.
In doing so, there is still value in accepting the purposeless of life. I think most of the world’s unhappiness stems from our collaboration in this shaky ongoing delusion that life’s main objective is working toward our traditional metrics of “Success.” No one posts your resume on your tombstone. When you die, the name attached to your designer watch won’t matter. Status is a high-school popularity contest that graduated into the workforce. Nothing happens for a reason: Life is a series of random possibilities and conditions caused by a range of factors, triggering a series of effects that ripple through time and change your life to varying degrees, eventually igniting a new string of experiences. Anyone who claims to know what happens to us after we die is full of shit. There is no Objective Truth; just a shared reality and 7.25 billion subjective interpretations of it — some more well-thought-out than others. Moby Dick was white because it is the sum of every color and it is no color.
You wasted life, why wouldn’t you waste the afterlife?
The human mind is adroit in its dexterity to reconcile the tension between the nihilistic facts of our existence and the happiness that comes when we strive to create our own meaning. This is a necessary dichotomy for joy to flourish. Joy lies in the human spirit that resists the riptide, an act of rebellion as Camus would say. Joy is the purest form of inner peace. But you can’t have joy without nihilism and happiness. After all, as The Flaming Lips sing, “Happiness makes us cry.”
If you’ve read this rambling existential diatribe up to this point, I’m sure you want some tidbits on how to attain joy through the path of least resistance. We all want to growth hack, increase productivity, earn, burn, optimize, organize, gameify, supercharge, live large, soar like a dove, find true love. These solutions aren’t convenient, and they sure as hell aren’t found in a tidy little listicle. I am not in the business of pretending I possess any sort of god-tier wokeness, or of having 12 rules for life. This lies in the realm of pseudo-sherpas preying on people’s lack of direction to sell banal self-help books (ahem, Jordan Peterson). Everyone bumbling along this planet is just guessing and second-guessing themselves through a momentum of minutia.
Life is a random explosion of miracles that appear in our consciousness each sunrise until we die, with a few precious memories jangling around in our skulls surrounded by a big black sea of what the actual fuck? No one knows what lies at the end of the book until they reach the final page. I’m sure the ultimate answer to all of life’s mysteries is found inside a dead man’s eyelids.
The best life advice is often simple and somewhat universal, so I can rattle off a few things that lifted me from my internal tar pit trap. Chill with the rise and grind — no one lies on their deathbed wishing they could’ve logged more hours in the office. Stop reading life-hack LinkedIn self-marketing listicle productivity-boosting nonsense. Experiment with psychedelics or do whatever to expand your consciousness. Meditate and self-reflect. Travel and see new places. Exercise and diet in moderation — excessive adherence to either or both is its own form of neuroticism. Date outside of your “type.” Be the person you want to date. Fall in love and get heartbroken. Take up a new hobby or learn a new skill. Get active in your community. Be politically engaged. Stop blowing up at strangers on social media, or unplug from it altogether. Read more books and less breaking news. Strive for ideas like egalitarianism, justice, wisdom, peace, and dignity. Listen to those with different perspectives. Find a creative outlet or appreciate more music, art, and performances. Perfect the balance between self-love and self-awareness.
Maybe all of these things won’t guarantee joy, but when you’re rutting in place, it only takes one step to hop off the treadmill. Personally, these actions have brought me closer to what John Gorman describes as a more optimal equilibrium of humility, curiosity, and empathy. And maybe that’s what joy boils down to: Realizing we’re disintegrating together with every flick of a second, so you spend your fleeting time aspiring to live a better life instead of a “best life.” It only takes an orgasm or a belly laugh to interrupt the long bouts of darkness. So we should take care of ourselves and each other a little more, maybe even enjoy the arc of our voyages before the ship finally docks onshore.
When your life is taken from this life, none of this will matter, except it all does.
