Why are young adults so enthralled by nihilism?

Is there something wrong with nihilism?

Suburbia gave american kids safety but sedentary boredom. This led to a myth of so-called childhood innocence built up first by pop culture and later by video games. When this myth is shattered, the child-now-turned-adult believes in nothing as reaction. Having the beliefs they were once fed so abruptly interrupted by harsh reality, nihilism is the welcome teat to suckle on for the world-weary. It takes time, but eventually they learn to 'build up from nothing', so to speak, moving on to whatever edgy new or repackaged movement will take them.

There's nothing wrong with objectivity, but the mistake is to think that the objective is "more real" than the subjective. That's what leads people to nihilism.

It's very odd to think that meaning could possibly be objective - that's simply incoherent, and amounts to saying that there could be a square circle.

>It's very odd to think that meaning could possibly be objective - that's simply incoherent
It's coherent if you give "meaning" a coherent definition.

Nietzsche's nihilism? No. However nihilism in its modern context (pop nihilism) is nothing but justification for suicidal hedonism.

>We live in a society that hails objectivity and rationality as the highest order
lol no

Differentiate between the two, then explain why either suicide or hedonism is bad.

We might establish an objective definition of meaning, but meaning itself is not objective. I would very much like someone to explain how in the world that makes any sense (and without switching the sense of the word, as there are different ones).

Because it's easily sympathized with, requires more than prima facie logic to offer counter arguments to and is pretty much the programmed default in western civilization. Every ethics class and book ends summarily with nihilism if it bothers to discuss Stoicism or any other branch or source. Philosophy values are encoded in every facet of learning and a teacher with basic nihilistic prenotions will pass them on to their students. This started in the late 70's in America with the decline in requirements to become a teacher due to.. well a need of teachers. When you scrape the bottom of the barrel for the mentors of the next generation, you produce a generation only at that level.

Schools have steadily asked less and less of students while increasing meaningless amounts of busy work for the students load. Fast forward to today and you have less kids graduating high school at the same standards of decades ago. What took students 4 years to achieve at a college or university now on average takes 6. That's including the raising of the full time hour standards.

Tldr; it's a default setting that people weren't taught to think their way out of.

Define bad.

You're the one who implied it was bad, what does that mean to you?

Define "meaning".

Define "define".

>it's an "I'm bored with spamming /tv/ with Rick and Morty so I will try some other boards" episode
>WUB A DUB DUB. GOD ISN'T REAL. LICK MY SZECHUAN BALLS, MORTY. WUB.
You get the idea.

>let's play semantics games so as not to examine our base assumptions
Nietzsche: there is no greater purpose so better yourself because what you do matters
Pop nihilsm: nothing matters so do what you want!

I come from an evolutionary point of view. Things that increase survivability are good, things that decrease survivability are bad. If you want to pull the whole "what is it to be good?" bullshit go take a philosophy 101 course. That should be more your scale

Suicide in principle directly harms an individuals reproductive potential and most of the time decreases survivability for their family. This in turn harms his children and thus his genetics. Now, often times people don't think about genetics at all. However they are the reason you have sexual urges and feel the need to reproduce. If you don't understand why genes want to proliferate, I suggest looking into evolutionary biology. But the tl;dr is that in general nothing that is alive actively seeks death.
Hedonism is the practice of self-indulgence.

Thus, suicidal hedonism is self-indulgance to the point of harming one's own survival, reproductive, and genetic potential. Examples are: heavy (or any) drug use, alcoholism, abnormal sexual practices, escapism, etc.
>But user! There are tons of societies that practice one or more or all of those things!
And none of them are nearly as successful as a society that wasn't built on those practices. By the way, I'm measuring success on both lifestyle and age expectancy.

A society who's culture revolves around suicidal hedonism is destined to fail. If you don't understand why your society failing is a bad thing, you're stupid.

If dubs civilization will collapse in the next few decades leading to mass death

>spook spook spook spook spook
>oh and spook too
>if you don't spook how spooks are spook for spook you're spook

>you don't have any sort of rebuttal so you revert to /leftypol/ maymays
Why am I not surprised. Next time post a picture of someone who didn't let other people fuck his wife and don't spew buzzwords. You need to up your game.

...

I'm not that user.

By your retarded logic trailer park trash who have 20 kids are the greatest successes in life and someone like Beethoven who didn't have any kids was a total failure
kys

Jesus fuck that tattoo is cringe worthy.

>that reading comprehension
>that lack of understanding implications

literally rebbit: the post

>Probably because the generation before them have pounded into their heads that life is horrible, so instead of figuring it out for themselves as they get older, they have realized this as children and are completely comfortable with it now, and almost see it as a challenge.

But your guess is as good as mine, Morty!

Stirner was a cuck?
Certainly explains his appeal with leftypol

>Objectively speaking, life has no higher purpose.
False
Logic isn't objective, nor is it a real thing.

>I come from an evolutionary point of view
You're a child, I see.
>If you want to pull the whole "what is it to be good?" bullshit go take a philosophy 101 course.
How dare people question your normative ethics!
>If you don't understand why your society failing is a bad thing, you're stupid.
If you don't accept the faulty foundations of my argument, then you're stupid! I'm right because i said I am you fucking white dude!

>Logic isn't objective, nor is it a real thing.
That's an invalid statement because all statements presuppose logic.

I have an IQ of 138 at my highest and 109 at my lowest (multiple personalities, different IQs). I take college classes since primary school and study theoretical physics. It's pretty likely I know more now than you will ever know.

How is that relevant?

>multiple personalities, different IQs
You forgot the one with the iq of 80, you know. Your real one

Wow you're like a real life devianArt character!

Because you can't reject the axioms of a system from within that system. Any act of communication has the unspoken component of "reality is objective".

>Multiple personalities
>>>Tumblr
>>>Tropes and Idioms
>>>>anywhere else

Why not? You're presupposing logic right now to defend it.

"Why" is in the domain of logic.

You're still enforcing rules upon me. One can work by them without being restrained by them.

Justifies senseless hedonism desu. Don't need a bigger reason than that.

>We live in a society that hails objectivity and rationality as the highest order.

x D

look at all these semantic non sequiturs!

>more rules

Post-modernism is like all modern philosophy, bunch of retards who can't do much else huffing each others farts. Forever.

>Say what you will about the tenets of National Socialism, at least it's an ethos

this is a bad joke

*Sigh* It's not a bad joke and I don't need to explain why you're wrong, as I've realised my intuition is just always right. It sounds arrogant and closed minded, but so would anyone who actually is actually always right. I just think at a higher plane of consciousness.

shit-tier plebbit millenials do, they worship degrasse tyson's BBC and Bill Nye's pop science.
They believe that because they believe science, than everything else they believe is true.

>Schools have steadily asked less and less of students while increasing meaningless amounts of busy work for the students load.

If they're working more on work then they aren't decreasing requirements. In reality, standards are very similar, but grade inflati9n hides this. Also, busy work has steadily decreased over the past few decades.

>Fast forward to today and you have less kids graduating high school at the same standards of decades ago.

This is because graduation rates are up. This means that less studious people gradiate and lower the average, but there is still the same if not a higher number of students meeting or surpassing historical standards.

>What took students 4 years to achieve at a college or university now on average takes 6. That's including the raising of the full time hour standards.

Again, college graduation rates have skyrocketed and ease of access lowers the average. The differences you see in schooling is due to the increase in availability of schooling. There are simply more people in the system, lowering the averages. However, diluting wine leaves tell same amount of alcohol. There are still tons of smart kids coming from the system, probably more than before. Also, you neglect other cultural aspects that disincentivize studiousness.

This is a troll post.

Hey thanks

The hope of the 90s is gone and the American dream dead. You could also say moral degeneracy depending on what you believe

>stirner is a /leftypol/ meme
>le cuckXdDDD

You have to go back.

By a purely biological standpoint, so long as all those children survive to reproductive age, and have children of their own, then yes.

Xir did it for upvotes Xddd

Lack of empathy and compassion. This in turn is reflected by people who experience this lack of empathy. It makes you feel like you are completely alone in this world and everyone is your enemy.

Humans are by their very nature social creatures. This is why something like the Golden rule, which gives you a connection to people outside of yourself

*can help someone overcome nihilism.

I don't know what happened there. Anyway, that's how I overcome nihilism. You simply accept that people are different, and can be quite cruel, but that that's still no reason to give up on your humanity

Reminder that the '90s were culturally an era of eschatology, anti-heroes, cyberpunk, grunge and other edgy shit. They were really the beginning of the current era of pessimism despite being objectively a pretty good decade for America.

>Lack of empathy and compassion. This in turn is reflected by people who experience this lack of empathy. It makes you feel like you are completely alone in this world and everyone is your enemy.
Ironic considering the (often neglected) context of the quote in OP's pic.
youtube.com/watch?v=E_qvy82U4RE

Nihilism is the new religion

The interesting part comes after nihilism

...

>Objectively speaking, life has no higher purpose.
Bullshit.

Objectively speaking we simply don't know what it is. Yet.

Maybe the universe created us in order to prevent the death of the universe or prepare the birth of a universe or something like that. You don't know where we will be in 1 million years.

White blood cells and neurons have a purpose, maybe we are the white blood cells or neurons of the universe.

Our society is just not mature and educated enough to understand it, but the purpose is probably so simple that future generations will look upon us as idiots who couldn't even understand the most obvious things.

>Objectively speaking we simply don't know what it is. Yet.
Why that rather than us not knowing whether there even is a purpose?

>White blood cells and neurons have a purpose,
Everything they do can be just as well described to be incidental, rather tahn having a purpose.

>There is no evidence for an objective higher purpose therefore I'll say there is and pretend the claim is just as valid as the claim there is none due to lack of any evidence
Dumbass
>White blood cells and neurons have a purpose
No they don't. Stop anthropomorphism chemistry and physics.

>We live in a society that hails objectivity and rationality as the highest order.
Absolutely ridiculous to believe this

Would we even be here if there was no purpose? Why does something exist rather than nothing?

>Would we even be here if there was no purpose?
Why not? Why does something require purpose to come into existence? Did geographical features need purpose to have come into existence or did they just come into existence and we ascribed purpose to them?

>Why does something exist rather than nothing?
We don't know.

kids grow up learning that they need goals, purposes, reasons, etc and they need to meet them.

by the time they're young adults, many realise they've failed in their goals and will never achieve them, and so, they adopt nihilism because it dulls the feeling of failure.

that is, it allows them to bury their head, saying "if life has no ends, then I've failed at nothing".

What is the purpose of your dick?

It didn't come into existence and you decided to stick it into every hole you could find and then you ascribed purpose to it and said: "Hm it makes children, interesting. Yep I decide this is the new purpose."

No there was only 1 hole where it would make sense to stick it in without being a degenerate. The purpose was to create new life from the beginning.

Likewise it is very possible that there is only 1 purpose for life which makes sense. I'm not saying there is one, I'm saying there MIGHT be one. And I'm not saying that you can't do anything else. Life can do whatever it wants or else suicides wouldn't exist.

Saying there is no purpose is like saying total freedom exists. A certain amount of freedom certainly exists but you can't deny that we are being pushed in a certain direction. If we weren't suicide would be easy as hell. I could just jump of a building. It would take a conscious decision to be attracted to a female, instead of it being an automatic response.

>No there was only 1 hole where it would make sense to stick it in without being a degenerate.
You're arbitrarily discrediting all other purposes someone could give his dick by calling it "degenerate" when those purposes are just as legitimate, so you are ascribing its purpose.
Maybe, rather than creating life, its purpose is to create pleasure and the creation of life is highly correlated, but coincidental?

it's an excuse to be lazy

People make lifestyles out of hobbies and then make tattoos that relate to their life styles

People get silly tattoos like that because nothing matters and we're all going to die.

Enjoy imposing artificial restrictions in the name of an entirely fabricated concept.

>You cant deny that we are being pushed in certain direction

Yes I can, Look at communists, Marx stablished the basic steps, then Lenin came and put their own interpretation, then Stalin put their own interpretation from Lenin one, then Mao put their own interpretation from Stalin, finally North Korea put their own interpretation from Mao. It's true that there are tendencies in specific points of history but in the end everyone do whatever they fucking want with what they have in front.

Clearly we are using two different sources for this first fact. I'm looking into the ratings of student preparedness for college courses and graduate courses. Kids out of high school are considered much less ready for the college student life across the board. Both private and public universities are admitting this.
I think you might be using performance mark scores for your source of reasoning but I think you'd agree that's not any more real world applicable (at least by US standards) than highschool level business classes.

Your last two points are strictly about numbers, not percentages so I think that is the source of the disconnect. Where a given highschool class might have had 100 students in it in the 80's and 50 of them were ready to proceed to colleges and universities, today that same high school would have about 350 (just graduating not including drop outs) and only the top ten percent or 35 students would be prepared for university workloads.

total chronic weed pussy atheism awesomesauce pizza pentagram dude XD

What about the tendency of humanity to become increasingly more free? This sounds like a direction and progress to me.

A man in a Chinese village in 100BC might have been very interested in other cultures but in order to experience them he had to travel thousands of miles or buy very expensive scrolls about them. And he doesn't even know how to read. And he would probably die in an attempt to travel that far. Today you can research everything the planet has to offer from your room in a few keystrokes. This sounds like progress to me.

In 1000BC you were exiled or beheaded if you were caught stealing. Today you just face a small punishment. This sounds like progress to me.

In 100 00BC you could simply kill a man and the only thing stopping you would be the revenge of his relatives/his tribe. This sounds like progress to me.

This is relevant to what I am currently watching;

youtube.com/watch?v=dvmUTeZvl6I

I bought into the cypto-marxist nihilist postmodern spiel in college and I also by utter coincidence became an anxious degenerate shit-tard.

>there is no greater purpose so better yourself because what you do matters

>Better yourself

I don't remind him saying that but if he did he was retardes sinc eyou can't be better if there is no objective good

If you can't better yourself morally then what?

Better your knowledge?

Your physical health?

Because I'm seeing this "better yourself" meme so often on Veeky Forums lately but it's not really clear what you mean by that

Why do you think that there being a tendency to develop one way on a macroscale does mean that there is purpose to the process?

When you punch a kangaroo, the kangaroo tends to punch back, throughout the ages. Is it the kangaroo's purpose to punch you?

>naive biologism

If meaning is created, one still makes a choice between entropy and choosing to alleviate human suffering. To alleviate the suffering of others will alleviate your own. That's hard wired into us. You can't change your biology with words.

Not op.

Proofs that le spook man is a kuk?

This is not exactly an intuitive concept and is disputable

The thing is if we continue progressing technologically we might find out if there is a purpose or not.

If we stay the same we will never find out. Which one is preferable?

There is a reason we are made the way we are made. Curious, always pushing our limits, trying to expand and explore etc... animals are the same, just not as smart as we.

"Do what you can do" is our ultimate purpose. We conquered the lands and oceans because we can. We put a man on the moon because we can. And if we can dominate the whole fucking universe, we sure as hell will. And if we can know our purpose and the purpose of reality, we sure as hell will do that do. Because we are fucking humanity, bitch. We don't fuck around. We are a force to be reckoned with.

>Objectively speaking, life has no higher purpose
>Objectively speaking
maybe yours doesn't you fucking loser

No, you brainlet, everyone who is intelligent and above 14 understands that nihilism is objective just like 2+2=4

>The thing is if we continue progressing technologically we might find out if there is a purpose or not.
Or we still might not and never will.

>If we stay the same we will never find out. Which one is preferable?
Is it so bad not to know what purpose one was given?

What good did it do Frankenstein's monster to find out that he was created for the sole purpose of creating life, rather than out of affection? What good it do to him to find out that he no more had any purpose? To find out that his creator didn't give a damn about him?
Wouldn't a beautiful lie have made him more happy? Wouldn't a purpose chosen by himself have given his life meaning?