I have this omnipresent pain inside me: a constant and gnawing pain that I’m always trying to distract myself from feeling. This pain is – generally – a kind of a minor background anguish that only occasionally gets bad enough to take over my life, but it’s also never not there.
It’s hard for me to describe the pain without resorting to figurative language, but I think it’s the pain of meaninglessness, the fear that my vast interior life will die with me, and that my brief miraculous flicker of consciousness will not have been for anything. For me, at least, there is a terrifying depravity to meaninglessness, because i calls into question not only why I write and read and garden and eat and love and everything else, but also whether I should even bother, which is a line of thinking I genuinely cannot afford to indulge.
Of course, such pain must be confronted and dealt with, carefully considered and battled against. There are times for that deep engagement with the overwhelming questions, but there are also times for pure and magnificently empty distraction. … I think empty distractions are gift to the world, because when that background pain overwhelms me, I can’t do the work of finding and building meaning in my life. Of course, distractions can become too powerful. They can begin to substitute for meaning, but I still wouldn’t want to attempt consciousness without them.
John Green
I said I was going to make decisions that were consistent with my values. It sounded a lot better conversationally than, “While you may not think so, I know that my life is meaningless, so I need to fabricate meaning to live it. If I can’t create that purpose, then I might be in trouble, I think. But if I find value in experiences, and I can actively and consciously seek circumstances that have the potential for such moments that would/will make all this worthwhile – even if for only a series of brief moments in time – … well, then I should be alright.”
Only now – after listening to this podcast about the game Tetris, of all things – I have begun to think of things through a different lens/prism. I wonder: Are the activities and experiences that I value the most the same that distract me most powerfully from my nihilism? Engagement with friends, a walk in the woods, embracing my wife – could it be that they don’t offer meaning so much as they have the greatest utility in preventing me from remembering how meaningless those same activities and experiences truly are?
Maybe.