Last October, as fall was overtaking the Midwest, I went to the store to buy a bag of potato chips. It was around 7:30 P.M. and the sun had already set. The sky was so dark the blueness seemed inky, and I could no longer see the clouds. Across the street from the store there was a great old tree that had yet to lose its leaves. I want to say it was an oak, though truthfully I cannot remember. The cold had already turned the tree auburn. Green faded into orange and red, like old paint was flaking away to reveal whatever lay underneath. Beneath the leaves stood a lamppost. It wasn’t old, like I remember the tree being, but the black paint was covered in dust and mud. White light shone up from the streetlamp, spreading out against the endless dark blue of the evening sky, breathing life back into the leaves.

Not Quite Crying in Museums

I’ve been feeling really nihilistic lately.

Sometimes people will say nice things about my writing; that it’s poetic and beautiful. Of course I always like getting compliments, though I feel it makes what I’m going to say next somewhat ironic.

I hate dreaming.

To me it feels like drowning. Sometimes I’ll dream about the people I used to date, or being lost in chaotic imitations of our own world, and for various reasons this is never fun. But the subject matter isn’t the main reason I hate dreaming, it’s the actual feeling of being in a dream. 

I can feel this pressure around my consciousness. I can sense that what I’m seeing isn’t real. And while my sleep-addled brain tries to figure out exactly how the scenery before me is fake, the dream drags me along. Forcing me to move while something gnaws at the back of my mind, telling me this is wrong. It feels like the pressure of being at the bottom of a pool, and the panic of running out of breath while you’re still 15 feet from the surface. Like there’s only a few seconds left to figure out that none of this is real.

Sometimes when I wake up I’ll have to sit in bed for half a minute or so just to make sense of what exists and what doesn’t. Readjust myself to the universe.

I’ve been feeling really nihilistic lately.

I didn’t always know this, or perhaps it wasn’t always the case, but my favorite type of museums are art museums. Though I’m not sure I get on well with museums at all, of any kind. 

Looking at a painting feels almost like dreaming. I have this sense that if I’m not careful I’ll be sucked into the artwork. I have to physically brace myself to fight back against the gravitational pull.

But there’s something intoxicating about skirting the void like that.

I find that my eyes always wander to the landscapes in the background. It feels almost like if I let myself go I could fall into these works, and if I kept walking along the painted hills and the watercolor clouds I would simply leave reality. Go beyond. Go to wherever comes next.

When I look at a painting I worry I’ll get endlessly lost. That I won’t be able to find my way back. But you can’t stare at art forever. So in the end I always pull away from the colors and force myself back into my own body.

I’ve been feeling really nihilistic lately.

Probably on account of how disorienting my own mind can be. Anyone who does analytic philosophy for fun surely doesn’t have the kind of brain you want to be lost in.

And I find that I often get lost in my own thoughts. I mean this in a very literal sense.

Like dreaming, sometimes the conscious world becomes shaped by whatever is happening inside my head. My feelings become instantiated objects, not quite corporeal but more real than an idea in the back of my head. I can move concepts and sentences around like sticky notes on a wall, and I can take them in my hand and feel their texture or crush them between my fingers.

The shape of the universe changes, new fourth dimensional architecture subtly altering the landscape around me, and my personality becomes smothered by all these random abstract objects I let clutter my conscious experience. If I don’t have anything to ground me I often start to slip away. I won’t even realize it until it’s too late.

I’ve been feeling really nihilistic lately.

Everywhere I turn I feel as if there’s this risk of losing myself. Of my consciousness getting ripped apart while I sink into a dream, or a painting, or a trip on the subway.

And unfortunately I’m currently in London on vacation — I figured if there was one thing that would improve my life it would be visiting the UK — so I’ve been taking lots of trips on the subway, and looking at paintings, and sleeping weird hours.

I will say, though, that the wide availability of public transportation is a nice change of pace from Ohio.

But seeing all these people makes me think about all the lives that are being lived. For a thousand people today I am just a brief and seemingly insignificant interaction. Someone taking up a seat on the subway, in their way as they try to exit. But my mere presence will ripple out across the whole of their lives. If I’ve offset their trip by even a second the gender of their child  may be completely changed.

Life has evolved as a complex method of energy capture. A sea sponge sits near a thermal vent so as to harvest the heat expunged by holes in the tectonic plates. Humans are simply the most cutting-edge form of energy collection to exist on this planet. Able to harness power on a near cosmic scale.

When I look at someone on the train I just see an advanced energy harvester. I just see these deterministic creatures that seek out warmth. When I look at the faces of people on the train, their clothes, their shoes, I just see random bundles of matter. Arbitrary offsettings in the schedules of random passerbys forever changing what they wear, or what their hair looks like, or even the shape of their face.

And this is true for me as well. And I can’t understand the thought of interpersonal connection anymore. 

I’ve been feeling really nihilistic lately.

I think it’s something you can’t really explain, though that hasn’t stopped me from trying. There’s no real point to any of this. In the most meaningful sense of linguistic communication it is true that nothing matters. People aren’t important, or valuable. You can choose to care about whatever you want, but it’s not grounded. It’s just a particular opinion.

Sometimes I’ve looked in the mirror and not understood what’s looking back at me. All I see is a configuration of matter and the seemingly random attributes it has. And sometimes I’ll look at other people and see the same thing. Is this any more wrong a way to view the universe than how I normally do?

I think if you haven’t experienced these things what I’m saying sounds confusing or stupid, even if you can comprehend in a technical sense what I’m describing. Same thing for the nihilism. Even if analytically you understand the point I’m making, even if you think it’s right, you won’t understand what I’m really trying to communicate.

There’s a kind of horror to being on a train and seeing every face as just an ordering of carbon atoms that I just don’t know how to express.

We can sympathize with other people’s intuitions and feelings, but if you haven’t ever experienced them then you won’t be able to understand how that person is seeing things. For billions of people I simply cannot grasp what it is to be them. And so I’m mostly failing to communicate my point.

I think this makes me insecure; like I’ll be judged for seeming stupid or saying something that appears obviously false to everyone else. I don’t even know if I would have understood what I’m saying 8 months ago.

Either way, it’s just a difference of opinion between us.

I’ve been feeling really nihilistic lately.

My brother and I went to an art museum today. To be honest I had forgotten the disorienting feeling I get when I look at art, but even if I had remembered there isn’t really an alternative. I wasn’t going to keep my brother in a hotel room all week, and anywhere I go will probably result in the same thing. Nihilism.

Surrounding me everywhere are random people, with random haircuts and random clothing, randomly looking at random paintings. Or it seems this way to me, though in actuality everything was likely determined by the particular way atoms exploded into the universe 13 billion years ago.

I don’t want to spend the rest of my life talking to robots, so it’s horrifying to see deterministic machines whenever I look at a person’s face. To feel as if they might be of comparable worth.

I know this is just a state of mind, but it’s so hard to see the otherside in this moment. I want to love and have people care for me, and I can’t understand how those things can exist when everyone is just animated arrangements of atoms, held together by physical laws I barely know anything about.

What if the rest of my life is spent like this? What if I’ll never be loved? What if such a thing isn’t even possible?

It’s overwhelming, but at the same time I don’t really feel anything at all. Just that this is how things are. So I keep walking from room to room, staring at smudges of paint on canvas.

I’ve been feeling really nihilistic lately.

Looking at a painting feels like willingly entering a dream. In some sense suffocating. But there’s also something freeing about being in a different universe for a moment.

I don’t know if the painting I’m staring at is fictional or biographical. I don’t know if any of this is real. But if it was, it would have been beautiful. Even like this I can understand that. These oil paint people would have had hopes and dreams and cared for each other.

I’m not sure why, but I want to cry, and I almost can’t stop myself from doing so.

I long for connection. To not feel so apart from the universe. I don’t feel connected to these painters, or the people they’re detailing. But for the first time in days I feel like it would have been possible if they were alive.

Somewhere across time people are looking at or dreaming up beautiful things, and through decades of dedication have honed the ability to capture what they’re seeing. None of this really matters, but there’s still something melancholy about that.

I don’t feel connected to anyone in this old and ornate building, except maybe my brother, though he is in another room. But I know some of them feel connected to each other. The way they laugh or stand around reading the plaque cards communicates this.

An incredible amount of work and sacrifice made a place like this and the paintings inside it possible. Made it possible for me to stand here. For everyone else to stand here too. I don’t know why but that makes me want to cry.

For the first time in a while I feel some sort of connection to the lives of other people. Not in a literal sense, but in the way that I could see how they might work. See more than just automatons moving. So many people and so many reasons and so many paths in life that all lead us to this one moment in time.

I don’t know if every person feels like me. If it’s just normal to see other people the way I sometimes do. If it is, I hope the people in these paintings, who may or may not have been real, still found time to be happy, as I sometimes have.

I’ve been feeling really nihilistic lately.

Nothing really matters.

The universe is mostly a black void that is somehow slowly fading into even more of an unordered sludge. Everything I care about is arbitrary, and who I am is fragile and radically contingent on random seconds in a billion other people’s lives. I’ll be dead by century’s end and there’s no reason to love my family.

And this is the part where I say but… 

But I’m not sure I have a hopeful conclusion. Which is what I always say before I find one anyways. But I’m not sure I’m the one to fish hope from the void either. I really, truly, believe that all that exists is a mesh of atoms, energy, and force; and analytically I’ve thought this for almost a decade.

But I haven’t spent the last decade nihilistic either. Mostly I’ve found the time to be happy, and to love. And, as I have also thought for all that time, the absence of truth and reason gives way to the most important question anyone can ask; what will I care about? How do I want to see the world?

I don’t want to view the world with the eyes of a nihilist. Thinking this way makes me feel alone. Unlovable. Like there’s some void in my heart, some lack of soul that means I deserve to be this way. 

To exist is a choice, and one we’re under no obligation to make.

To care is an act of cosmic rebellion, one we don’t have to partake in.

To love is to make a hard decision. To draw an arbitrary line around a set of molecules and fluids and somehow find the will to treasure any of it. To find a reason to ground yourself in this universe.

I’ve been feeling really nihilistic lately.

It’s all just a mesh of stuff, meaningless and randomly arranged.

All that separates us from nothingness is the sheer will to value a few random people. To care about a couple arbitrary goals.

With all we have we need to shape the universe to reflect that which is important to us. Love is the purest form of commitment; one must etch it into the fabric of reality. 

At least this is how I view it.

We are only here for a brief moment. With the time we have we must change the universe to reflect the things we care about and the people we adore. 

No one else will do this. The default is meaningless and lifeless atoms drifting across the cosmic void. And I can’t stand to see the universe like that.

I think this is why I take commitment so seriously. So when I choose to love someone I choose to give them whatever I can. To prove that even when I’m like this, things can still be beautiful and lovely, despite the fact that such concepts are true only in relation to me. To prove to the unconscious stars that these people exist, and that they are cared for by me.

I doubt I ever really succeed, but this is how I feel.

I’ve been feeling a lot of things lately.

The trajectory of the universe was set from the beginning. There’s no changing it now. How my life goes is outside my control. 

We are limited by the nature of reality; by what was set in motion billions of years ago. But we shouldn’t pretend we know what our limits are either. The only way to discover those is to move forward in time.

We are not destined to spend our lives alone and miserable. At least you can never and will never know that was your destiny until the end.

Standing here in this art gallery I wish I was holding someone’s hand. That there was someone next to me to tell me it’s okay that I’m like this sometimes. That there’s nothing broken in me. Someone to push away the darkness with. To keep me from getting lost. Someone who will breathe life back into the autumn leaves and the evening sky.

But besides me are only strangers. My brother has wandered off and for now I am alone trying not to fall into this painting. Trying not to cry.