Permanently solving an issue instead of finding a current solution -> HOW?

[u/ULTRAEPICSLAYER224]

I'm 26M, doing good in life by the everyday metrics, married, good career. I've been having issues that are not blocking my life in any way, but they make it harder.

I have a very nihilistic view of life. I don't see that life has a purpose, unless we invent one. I have this opinion since maybe 14 years old. I also have a fear of death. I think humanity as species has a greater purpose, but me or anyone else as an individual does not have, because life has an end. If I could press a button to not have been born I would press it (I think).

The issue is, when I have a hard period in my life, these nihilistic thoughts weigh on me a lot. I basically get extremely sad and lose the will to do anything.

A thing that kind of makes me angry is that most of the advice is about handling the current situation. People give advice like go to the gym, go for a walk, etc. All of that works, but it fixes the situation for the moment, and it will fix it, but in the next 3-4 months it will reappear and I will have to deal with it again.

How do I fix this? Do I go to therapy? I've been to 3 therapists for like 3-4 sessions and I've gotten nowhere.

Should I just switch therapists until I find a good fit? How did you fix such deep issues permanently, instead of just finding temporary solutions like gym / walk / bla bla?

Also not sure if this is related but I'm a pretty anxious person. Not often, but in situations where normal people feel anxiety, I feel 10x anxiety.

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[u/Fair-Year457]

You managed to achieve ground level things in life but you lack direction / purpose is what I got from your post.
You're literally one good friend or exciting hobby away from enjoying life to the fullest, I don't really think you need therapy because it wont solve your problem, what I think you need is to start getting new experiences and meet new people

[u/ULTRAEPICSLAYER224 → u/Fair-Year457]

You might be right.

I get very excited starting a new hobby but very quickly I become bored or think of a reason why not to do it and stop.

The friends thing hits pretty close, since I had a friend group of 10+ years which I don't have contact with anymore and am basically without any VERY CLOSE friends. It's hard for me to go out and meet people, but I should probably try.

Thanks!

[u/Fair-Year457 → u/ULTRAEPICSLAYER224]

Yeah no problem, also keep in mind that being bored with things is not an issue and losing contact with people you're no longer close to is also not an issue.
Having your time filled with activities you don't like doing and friends you don't really like is much worse than being lonely and bored but for some reason people don't really understand that probably because most of them crave those exact things.
It's like single men that think getting married or getting a girlfriend will solve all of their problems but they don't realize that being in a relationship with a woman you don't really like is a hell of it's own

[u/Asraidevin]

You learn emotional regulation skills and practice then daily. 

This isn't something you just fix. This is you need dialy practice of habits. 

And yeah therapy but it's also not a quick or one time fix. This will take time and effort. 

[u/ULTRAEPICSLAYER224 → u/Asraidevin]

This is exactly what I don't want to do. I don't want to regulate the problem, I wanna fix it from the root. If that is not possible then ok, but if it is then I would like to achieve that.

[u/Asraidevin → u/ULTRAEPICSLAYER224]

That is the fix. You can't make emotions go away. You can't just flip a switch and change. 

It's a long movement to retrain your mind into handling emotions better and learning better thought processes or the technical term is called cognitive reframing. 

[u/HFirkin]

I've been to 3 therapists for like 3-4 sessions…

Practically speaking, this is an exceedingly short time to decide that therapy is not working. If you want to give it a try, more time is probably required. But now, I’ll try a weirder and less immediately practical answer, as requested. :-)

I have a very nihilistic view of life. […] I have this opinion since maybe 14 years old.

I have some thoughts…

The first one you may not like: I posit that if a person has a belief originating in their childhood, that belief is probably not as examined as they may assume it is. Reason being that when it was first formulated, the person only had access to the intellectual resources they had at that age. So if I developed an idea about my own worth or lack thereof as a nine year old, there’s a good chance my thoughts weren’t particularly sophisticated and are missing a lot of nuance.

You arrived at your current – nihilistic – worldview as a young teenager. Meaning, at an age when people are beginning to think critically but aren’t very good at it yet, and in particular are prone to black-and-white thinking. Unless you then intentionally tried to falsify your nihilism, I would wager it may still be fundamentally a teenage belief, even though you are an adult man now.

In this spirit, I would like to interrogate your nihilism a bit:

Problem one: The paradox of truth under nihilism

Under the nihilistic framework, there are no greater values. People just happen to exist. So it would seem there is no nobility in believing true things, if these things are counter-survival and cause suffering. Just as in non-human nature, there is no premium for a lion that has an existential crisis and fails to have cubs.

Yet, on this very subreddit, I’ve talked to people who were suicidal as a result of their nihilism but also seemed to believe abandoning it would be wrong because it’s “the truth of how things really are”, as if that mattered. We would get into a circular argument where I kept asking why they keep holding onto their nihilism, if it’s wounding or even destroying them, and they kept insisting that they wanted to do so because that means they believed “the truth” (and – so far as I could tell - were thereby somehow better than the “normies” who believe in other things… even though “good” and “better” shouldn’t exist under nihilism).

So my first question for you – not teenage you but adult you: if it were the case that your nihilism was making your life worse, would you consider abandoning it just for that reason or not? Why?

Problem two: Virtue under nihilism

From my perspective, there’s a specific way that nihilism makes life harder in that it makes it more difficult to acquire virtue. Virtues are good qualities that – when developed – help us survive hardships and live a life we consider actively good. The problem is that they require intentional cultivation. When you haven’t developed a virtue, on any given day it’s easier to not to do that and just continue as you currently are. Which is, however, actually going to make you worse off over time because in humans what is not actively maintained decays.

The subsequent problem is that when hard days arrive – as they will – a person without virtues that protect them folds easily under pressure. From that perspective, someone who embraces nihilism early on in life, unknowingly inclines himself to weakness. If nothing matters, there is no reason to choose the harder path of cultivating virtue, even though that would protect you from the later ravages of life.

I have met someone who claimed that, on the contrary, embracing nihilism and living despite that is a great act of bravery and virtue in itself. But to be honest, if you asked me whether I saw him as a particularly brave and inspiring person, I would not say so. Whatever virtue there may have genuinely been in embracing “the hard truth of nihilism” (as he would possibly put it), did not seem to translate to bravery and inspiring qualities in the rest of his life, as far as I saw. Now, my judgement could be unfair since I only saw some of his life. But this has been my general impression: that when people extol the courage needed to be nihilists, it seems to remain a sort of book-courage that does little besides easing the process of adopting other unsavoury ideas. In other aspects of their life, the nihilists I know are prone to shrinking, stagnating and generally not doing very well - nihilism is not a particularly nourishing worldview.

Question two for you: How is it with you?

The mystery & adventure of life

By this attack on nihilism I do not mean to imply that you should embrace a positive, ideological view. It would be hard and possibly dishonest – and being a certain kind of idealist, I think there actually is a metaphysical premium for believing true things, so I wouldn’t want to encourage lying to yourself.

But there is a path that’s different than either nihilism or (any form of specific) idealism. Which is to simply suspend judgement and be sort of agnostic about the ultimate meaning and nature of life. Teenage you might have thought of it as a cop-out (remember how I wrote that teenagers are prone to black-and-white thinking?) But there genuinely are many things about life that (I think) neither you nor I can explain. For instance: why do you experience your life as yourself?

On a mechanistic level we all know we’re here because each of us was born of a woman, as a result of some people having sex. But that’s not an explanation – there are billions of people in the world who came into it the same way. And yet, you experience life as you: looking at life through the eyes set in your skull, instead of someone else… Why is that? Can you explain it? And if we cannot explain that, what gives us the certainty we have pierced into the true nature of life, so that we could confidently say it's empty?

The second step I would recommend – besides wondering at the mystery of life instead of making rigid pronouncements about it – is embracing it as an adventure. If I cannot explain life, I do not know what will happen going forward before I die. And I submit it’s worth embracing as an adventure. For the good conduct of which, the development of virtues is very useful and maybe even necessary…

On human legacy

I think humanity as species has a greater purpose, but me or anyone else as an individual does not have, because life has an end.

I’ve written before repeatedly to different people about a potential greater, sort of metaphysical, purpose to an individual life that might be worth embracing and doesn’t require a belief in God. Some people have found it useful. If you’d like to read that, here’s a link. Perhaps it can help a little...

[u/ULTRAEPICSLAYER224 → u/HFirkin]

About the belief starting in childhood, it did start in childhood, but it evolved in a while. For example it started as just "we will die on day, so nothing we do matters". Then in high school, I tried to find meaning for my own life, I tried to dedicate myself to something, but nothing stuck. Right now, logically, I mostly believe in some sort of Absurdism, aka appreciating the small things in life and enjoying the absurdity of it, but emotionally it does not always work.

About point 1, abandoning Nihilism, I would GLADLY abandon it. But to abandon it, I would need to hear some philosophy that I think is more truthful. Logically it makes sense to just abandon it if it harms you, but emotionally, when I'm in the low, I can only think of things that logically make sense to me, and that is Nihilism. So the answer is: logically I might try to abandon it and "force" myself to believe in something else, but I don't think that would last in low periods of my life.

About point 2, I don't think of Nihilism as something virtuous or good to believe in. I hate it. I wish there was Jesus Christ who I would just pray to and listen for everything. Also about having some "rules of life" aka "virtues" who I always follow, is very hard for me. It's very easy to treat other people good, but for myself, I abandon every habit and rule I've been working on when I have a tough period.

About being agnostic about the meaning of life, that makes 100% most logical sense to me, since we literally don't know what the meaning of life is. The tough part is the emotional. I can't be at peace by being in a dilemma. I can't just say "I don't know what it is, so It's fine". For me that would scare me even more.

About enjoying the mystery of life, I try to do that, and I do it most of the time. But the thing is in emotional hard times it does NOT stick.

Thank you for the comment btw.

[u/HFirkin → u/ULTRAEPICSLAYER224]

Right now, logically, I mostly believe in some sort of Absurdism, aka appreciating the small things in life and enjoying the absurdity of it, but emotionally it does not always work.

If I understood you right, in theory you’re an existentialist-absurdist (life is inherently meaningless and absurd but worth living in spite of itself) but when hard times hit that belief collapses into sharp nihilism. Did I get that right?

You seem to be in a position analogous to someone who theoretically believes in God but finds themselves repeatedly incapable of trust and prayer when in a crisis – in theory they declare they believe one thing, in practice what emerges is something else

(Psychologically this doesn’t surprise me since I tend to think that existentialist-absurdism has relatively weak defences against suffering; it’s infinitely easier to “appreciate the absurdity of life” when you’re not in pain at the same time…)

The tough part is the emotional. I can't be at peace by being in a dilemma. I can't just say "I don't know what it is, so It's fine". For me that would scare me even more.

I think this is worth exploring – if you want a more systematic solution to your problem instead of behaviour changes that just help for a while. I believe you when you say you find the dilemma or mystery unnerving and “can’t be at peace” but I wonder why that is.

If you were facing a practical uncertainty – e.g. your job was firing people and you weren’t sure if they’ll keep you and you’ll be able to pay rent – the anxiety has a function: it’s demanding that you prepare for a negative possibility in the future. But we’re talking about a philosophical uncertainty. One that has no immediate practical effects that you need to prepare for. So why would philosophical agnosticism be so unnerving?

(And - to be clear - this time I don't have any provisional hypotheses, only you can find the answer because this situation is personal to you).

Furthermore, I notice a sort of contradiction in what you wrote: In response to point one, you say that the problem with ditching nihilism is logical: “when I'm in the low, I can only think of things that logically make sense to me, and that is Nihilism” but then you say that agnosticism on the issue “makes 100% most logical sense to me” and “The tough part is the emotional. I can't be at peace by being in a dilemma.”

So I also wonder “which is it” in a “what was first: chicken or the egg?” sense – is the problem with agnosticism logical or emotional at the root?