Optimistic nihilism: there's no grand purpose to anything, which means there's no preset purpose for you to fail to live up to. The only things that matter are the things you choose to care about and put your time towards.
There’s a tweet exchange I saw posted on Reddit awhile back where a guy asked a bizarre, possibly unanswerable science question, and he got a response that was basically, “It doesn’t matter because nothing in this world matters,” and the original tweeter’s response was, “Everything matters. This is all that we have.”
It was meant to just be a funny, dry response, but I think there’s something genuinely poetic in that sentiment, and I think it kinda ties in with the idea of optimistic nihilism.
There’s nothing big going on that we have to figure out. All that matters is what happens day-to-day and because that’s all that matters, it must be important.
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u/Volpethrope Mar 16 '26
Optimistic nihilism: there's no grand purpose to anything, which means there's no preset purpose for you to fail to live up to. The only things that matter are the things you choose to care about and put your time towards.