<story><title>What Nihilism Is Not</title><url>https://thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/what-nihilism-is-not/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>stanfordkid</author><text>I used to be really into philosophy, until the revelation hit me that philosophy is ultimately ontological: it names ways of thinking -- suppose living life is like painting a painting. Philosophy, then, is a theory of aesthetics. Sure it can be handy, but at the end of the day you need to create a painting. How much time you spend reading about aesthetics deducts from your time actually painting and experimenting.&lt;p&gt;I think the author doesn&amp;#x27;t look at the drawbacks of nihilism completely -- nihilism is a blank canvas as opposed to something like paint-by-numbers. Ultimately the choice of nihilism is still personal. We are all given a blank canvas to start. What kind of painting do you want to hang up?&lt;p&gt;Nihilism is basically saying that no theory of aesthetics is better than any other. Is this really true? Would you paint random dots on the canvas? Surely circles are more meaningful than scribbles?</text></comment>
<story><title>What Nihilism Is Not</title><url>https://thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/what-nihilism-is-not/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>mirimir</author><text>Huh.&lt;p&gt;I did maybe a couple decades of applied nihilism, as presented by Landmark Education. It helped me a lot, given that I&amp;#x27;m bipolar and prone to pessimism and depression.&lt;p&gt;So this makes sense to me:&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; If, as I suggested earlier, nihilism and pessimism are opposites, then nihilism is actually much closer to optimism.&lt;p&gt;But not this:&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; Such a lack of awareness is the point of nihilism, as nihilism is all about hiding from despair rather than dwelling on it.&lt;p&gt;As Landmark taught it, it&amp;#x27;s not so much hiding from despair as cultivating the awareness that despair is an illusion. That is, despair isn&amp;#x27;t about what happened. It&amp;#x27;s about our story about what happened. And our stories by default just reflect our programming.&lt;p&gt;This does, however, but it&amp;#x27;s too ambiguous:&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; But the nihilist has feelings. It’s just that what the nihilist has feelings for is itself nothing.&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s not that it&amp;#x27;s &amp;quot;nothing&amp;quot;, exactly. It&amp;#x27;s that it&amp;#x27;s indeterminate. By default, it&amp;#x27;s however we&amp;#x27;ve been programmed. But it can be whatever we choose freely.</text></comment>