Progressive Nihilism

You buy a guy a Batchelor’s degree in philosophy and set him loose to wander around in the woods for a while and there’s no telling what he’ll come up with. If you made it past the fifth syllable of that title (there are six), then you’re a real glutton for punishment.

WTF even is ‘progressive nihilism?’ Well, it’s a thing I made up, right in my head, while trying to understand my proper place in the world, how to square the inevitability of death with the need to impose some kind of meaning on the time I have left. These are the things I think about while I’m out riding bikes by myself.

Which explains why sometimes my Di2 batteries go dead, because my eye is most definitely not on THAT ball.

If you’re still with me (turn back now), let’s start with the premise that nothing matters. We’re all gonna die. Our personal impact on the world is beyond negligible. We’re not even rounding errors. History’s greatest philosophers and a great many physicists have devoted centuries to the case for free will (as opposed to determinism) and even the idea of a collective reality (over solipsism). If I’ve lost you (possibly for the second time), don’t worry. I’m going to simplify it now.

When it suits me, I embrace the idea that things don’t matter. The stuff that bugs me, the moments I dwell on, times of anxiety or depression, they are all based on inaccurate abstractions. The past exists exactly nowhere. The future is unknowable (this is separate from the logical concept that every cause has an effect, because I don’t have the juice to do those calculations in real time). Even the present is a cobbled together mess of sensory input, passed through the bullshit filter of the stories I tell myself about the not-present (also known as “my baggage”).

In this burn-it-all-down manner, I dismiss insecurities about whether I’m fit enough, fast enough, nice enough, smart enough, whether I’m doing enough, doing the right things, eating right, etc. None of that shit matters. It’s just a psycho-emotional web I spin and then trap myself in.

So that’s the nihilism piece.

And actually, that is also the jumping off point for progress. When nothing matters, conditionally, about what I’m doing, I’m pretty free to do the things that mean something to me. There’s a micro/macro pivot here that makes the paradox of imbuing things with meaning against a canvas of meaninglessness work. Nothing I do makes a difference on the macro level, but the stuff I do can make a difference on the micro level. To get to that micro-level stuff, I have to shrug off the heavy burden of macro-bullshit.

We are all camels squeezing through the eye of a needle here.

Of course, not everything I do needs to be rationalized. Sometimes I will burn things down (including myself), to see what that looks/feels like. I suspect a great many of you ardent bike riders know this experiment well. Then I’ll do something else, because one event doesn’t need to flow from the one preceding it in a personal, micro-sensical way. I can discard the ideas and feelings that don’t serve me in the moment. I can forgo adding more shit to my personal baggage.

This goes back to a thing I wrote about Time Machines. Actually, I did it twice.

I love to have a good, complicated think, and I love to posit a bunch of novel (to me anyway) ideas, but what I love even more is finding the practical application of those ideas, the ways in which my natural tendencies (e.g., self-criticism, self-destruction) can be turned to positive and creative ends, and that’s what progressive nihilism is, the burning-down to grow something better.

This may all strike you as so much hokem, the kind of nonsense only a middle-aged guy with a BA in horsecrap would come up with, BUT consider your average bike ride. You leave from your home, pedaling away cheerfully to meet up with some friends or on your own, just to see what’s happening in the world. You ride for a while, growing tired. You’ve expended a lot of energy for some reason (ok, there are many reasons), but eventually you return home. You’ve ridden from Point A to Point A.

This strikes me as almost a perfect illustration of Progressive Nihilism. You’ve gone nowhere. In fact, you’ve burned some portion of your short time on this side of the soil to do it. And yet, it means something to you, and despite its absurdity, you’ll do it again, believing (and who am I to question you) that the more you do it, the more it actually means.

In 1989, my degree cost $80,000, which is a snip by today’s standards. But put yourself in my parents’ shoes, and understand that they, too, must have been Progressive Nihilists. This fatalistic optimism just runs in the family.