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What nihilism acknowledges that other philosophies don’t

February 02, 2026 • 5 min read • views
What nihilism acknowledges that other philosophies don’t
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Become a member Login The Big Think Interview What nihilism acknowledges that other philosophies don’t "The thing that the nihilist recognizes is that the values he or she holds are not grounded in anything other than their own preferences." A man with short dark hair and a mustache wears a dark checked blazer over a navy shirt, posing against a plain light background. What nihilism acknowledges that other philosophies don’t Alex O’Connor A man with short dark hair and a mustache wears a dark checked blazer over a navy shirt, posing against a plain light background. Alex O’Connor, also known as Cosmic Skeptic, is an English public speaker and content creator recognized for his work on philosophy, ethics, religion, and secularism. He hosts the podcast Within[…] Overview Transcript A man with short dark hair and a mustache wears a dark checked blazer over a navy shirt, posing against a plain light background. What nihilism acknowledges that other philosophies don’t Alex O’Connor A man with short dark hair and a mustache wears a dark checked blazer over a navy shirt, posing against a plain light background. Alex O’Connor, also known as Cosmic Skeptic, is an English public speaker and content creator recognized for his work on philosophy, ethics, religion, and secularism. He hosts the podcast Within[…]

Most people go through their lives with perfectly good reasons for what they do, and almost no reason to question these reasons. What happens when we ask why ordinary actions feel self-justifying, and what happens when that chain of “becauses” finally runs out? Alex O’Connor explores.

ALEX O'CONNOR: Most people instinctively think that there is some kind of meaning to life. They just sort of assume that it's there in the same way that if you ask them, "Why are you getting out of bed to go to work? Why are you doing that to make money? Why to provide for my family? Why to bring up my children healthily? Why because I want my children to be healthy? Why? What do you mean why?" For some people, they just don't recognize the question. They're just like, "What are you talking about?" For other people, they hear that and they go, "Gosh, you know what? Fair enough, I actually don't know." The nihilist is someone who sort of takes a bird's eye view of it and realizes that it's all a little bit meaningless. It is nicer to think that you are here for some kind of reason that's written into the rules of the universe than that it all is just a happy or unhappy accident. My name's Alex O'Connor. I'm the host of the Within Reason podcast. I think I'm best described as a philosophy YouTuber and former edgy atheist. Meaning, I think, is used synonymously with purpose. And purpose is something like reason to act or reason to be. Whenever anybody acts in any way, when I pick up a glass of water to have a drink, when I walk to a bus stop or something, there will be a reason why I've done that. These kinds of behaviors don't just spring up ex nihilo. They exist for some kind of reason. And so if you ask me why it is that I'm reaching my arm over there, it might be because I'm trying to pick up a glass of water. Why am I doing that? I don't just do that randomly. Well, because I'm thirsty. Okay, well, why am I thirsty? Well, now we're kind of into some biological science. You might say, "Well, it's been a while since I've last had a drink." And then you might describe what it is about my biology that causes thirst and you might even give an evolutionary explanation for why it is that we've developed this sensitivity to thirst. And eventually this kind of has to bottom out somewhere. It will either have to bottom out in some evolutionary reason or this contingent chain of reasoning just essentially goes back forever or it terminates in something which is self-justifying. For the religious, it will be God. Everything they do, even if they don't cognize it all the time, will be for the glory of God. And if you're a secular person, it will likely be something else. For some people, their meaning in life might be the raising of their children. And for most people, it probably is relational. And when people say that they found their meaning in life, I think a lot of the time they found that self-justifying principle. The thing that the nihilist recognizes is that the values he or she holds are not grounded in anything other than their own preferences or aesthetic preferences. Nihilism comes in many forms and depending on the context can mean many different things. But most broadly, it's the lack of belief in or belief that there is no such thing as an objective purpose to life or to the actions that we commit and the behaviors that we portray within life. A lot of people think that if you lived like a nihilist, you'd sort of rot away in bed. Some nihilists may do that and I think there is actually a correlation, a strong correlation between philosophical nihilism and practical depression. However, nihilism is not about the actual consequences or the things that you're doing, it's about the purpose behind them, it's about the meaning behind them. And so, suppose that you're feeling thirsty. I could explain to you that the only reason you're feeling thirst is because of some animalistic drive that you had no control over. But you're still thirsty. You still have that desire. You still have that value of quenching your thirst and so you'll still do that. And the same applies in all areas of life, art and music and poetry, but also including relationships, friendships, that kind of stuff. You're still going to want to do those things. It's like Camus famously described in the myth of Sisyphus, this person who suddenly recognizes the structure of their day, waking up, having breakfast, getting in the car, going to work, taking a break, work, going back home, eating some food, going to sleep, starting again. And you sort of start to notice that you're doing this. And it's not anything about what you're doing, it's realizing, taking a step back and realizing that there's no meaning to any of this. There's no... That there's nothing more than just my doing it. It doesn't go any deeper than that. One of the still greatest expositions of nihilism that can be found in the printed word is the book of Ecclesiastes in the Old Testament. Ecclesiastes takes us through the reflections of this man, this anonymous author. Some have tried to identify him, but it doesn't really matter who it is. We know that he was a great man, a king. He lived an illustrious life, but he saw no meaning in it. And he keeps coming back to this word "hevil," which means literally something like "wind." And so it's translated as "vanity" by the King James. Vanity of vanities. Everything is vanity. Meaningless. Meaningless. Everything is meaningless is one translation. Absurd, absurd. Everything is absurd is my favorite. He's like, "I denied my eyes no pleasure that they saw. If I wanted something, I took it. I drank wine, I partied, I lived life. But in the end, I saw that it was all "hevil." It was all just wind. It's just... Nothing. It just happens. And then it's gone. And it doesn't mean anything. But the most interesting thing is that it seems to suggest that everything that this guy was saying was true, that it is all just wind, but that somehow, by just fearing God and keeping His commandments, you have somehow solved the problem. I don't think that that's a very satisfying solution. But then I think that that is the great theme of nihilistic literature. People try for a kind of solution, but ultimately, for me, at least, they seem relatively unsatisfying. Fast forward thousands of years and you get Albert Camus' Myth of Sisyphus, which famously ends with this idea of imagining Sisyphus happy. In fact, Camus was celebrated for the starkness of the opening line of the myth of Sisyphus, that there is one serious philosophical question, and that is suicide. Because everything else, you know, how many dimensions there are to space, whether abstract numbers exist, all of that is secondary. The most foundational question is whether or not you're going to, as he once put it, have a cup of coffee or kill yourself today. You look at the seeming arbitrariness of the world around us, the way that the environment and the organisms within it seem to just sort of almost randomly evolve according to literal just battles for survival. I think people want something a little bit more than that. They want something which feels worthwhile, that's somehow sort of justified by some universal principle. There's almost like a moral element, that it's a good thing to be alive, that it's a good thing to live a meaningful life. And that kind of thing, I think, is very difficult to ground objectively. In fact, if somebody ever asks me how I might console myself in the face of these existential woes, genuinely, at least personally, it is in agnosticism. It's in the fact that I do not know the first thing about why any of this exists. Of course I don't, you know? And sometimes people ask me in a context on a podcast or on a stage or something, implicitly as if I'm going to have some answer, as if I've like worked it out and I'm going to be able to communicate that to people. And I'm interested in philosophy, so I might have read something that helps to elucidate a concept or I might be able to put a word on something that you've been thinking but didn't know was, you know, also thought by other people. But we're doing the same thing here and ultimately I have absolutely no idea what the ultimate answers are. And so that kind of consoles me. And I suppose I'm just not convicted of nihilism.

Overview Transcript

Most people go through their lives with perfectly good reasons for what they do, and almost no reason to question these reasons. What happens when we ask why ordinary actions feel self-justifying, and what happens when that chain of “becauses” finally runs out? Alex O’Connor explores.

ALEX O'CONNOR: Most people instinctively think that there is some kind of meaning to life. They just sort of assume that it's there in the same way that if you ask them, "Why are you getting out of bed to go to work? Why are you doing that to make money? Why to provide for my family? Why to bring up my children healthily? Why because I want my children to be healthy? Why? What do you mean why?" For some people, they just don't recognize the question. They're just like, "What are you talking about?" For other people, they hear that and they go, "Gosh, you know what? Fair enough, I actually don't know." The nihilist is someone who sort of takes a bird's eye view of it and realizes that it's all a little bit meaningless. It is nicer to think that you are here for some kind of reason that's written into the rules of the universe than that it all is just a happy or unhappy accident. My name's Alex O'Connor. I'm the host of the Within Reason podcast. I think I'm best described as a philosophy YouTuber and former edgy atheist. Meaning, I think, is used synonymously with purpose. And purpose is something like reason to act or reason to be. Whenever anybody acts in any way, when I pick up a glass of water to have a drink, when I walk to a bus stop or something, there will be a reason why I've done that. These kinds of behaviors don't just spring up ex nihilo. They exist for some kind of reason. And so if you ask me why it is that I'm reaching my arm over there, it might be because I'm trying to pick up a glass of water. Why am I doing that? I don't just do that randomly. Well, because I'm thirsty. Okay, well, why am I thirsty? Well, now we're kind of into some biological science. You might say, "Well, it's been a while since I've last had a drink." And then you might describe what it is about my biology that causes thirst and you might even give an evolutionary explanation for why it is that we've developed this sensitivity to thirst. And eventually this kind of has to bottom out somewhere. It will either have to bottom out in some evolutionary reason or this contingent chain of reasoning just essentially goes back forever or it terminates in something which is self-justifying. For the religious, it will be God. Everything they do, even if they don't cognize it all the time, will be for the glory of God. And if you're a secular person, it will likely be something else. For some people, their meaning in life might be the raising of their children. And for most people, it probably is relational. And when people say that they found their meaning in life, I think a lot of the time they found that self-justifying principle. The thing that the nihilist recognizes is that the values he or she holds are not grounded in anything other than their own preferences or aesthetic preferences. Nihilism comes in many forms and depending on the context can mean many different things. But most broadly, it's the lack of belief in or belief that there is no such thing as an objective purpose to life or to the actions that we commit and the behaviors that we portray within life. A lot of people think that if you lived like a nihilist, you'd sort of rot away in bed. Some nihilists may do that and I think there is actually a correlation, a strong correlation between philosophical nihilism and practical depression. However, nihilism is not about the actual consequences or the things that you're doing, it's about the purpose behind them, it's about the meaning behind them. And so, suppose that you're feeling thirsty. I could explain to you that the only reason you're feeling thirst is because of some animalistic drive that you had no control over. But you're still thirsty. You still have that desire. You still have that value of quenching your thirst and so you'll still do that. And the same applies in all areas of life, art and music and poetry, but also including relationships, friendships, that kind of stuff. You're still going to want to do those things. It's like Camus famously described in the myth of Sisyphus, this person who suddenly recognizes the structure of their day, waking up, having breakfast, getting in the car, going to work, taking a break, work, going back home, eating some food, going to sleep, starting again. And you sort of start to notice that you're doing this. And it's not anything about what you're doing, it's realizing, taking a step back and realizing that there's no meaning to any of this. There's no... That there's nothing more than just my doing it. It doesn't go any deeper than that. One of the still greatest expositions of nihilism that can be found in the printed word is the book of Ecclesiastes in the Old Testament. Ecclesiastes takes us through the reflections of this man, this anonymous author. Some have tried to identify him, but it doesn't really matter who it is. We know that he was a great man, a king. He lived an illustrious life, but he saw no meaning in it. And he keeps coming back to this word "hevil," which means literally something like "wind." And so it's translated as "vanity" by the King James. Vanity of vanities. Everything is vanity. Meaningless. Meaningless. Everything is meaningless is one translation. Absurd, absurd. Everything is absurd is my favorite. He's like, "I denied my eyes no pleasure that they saw. If I wanted something, I took it. I drank wine, I partied, I lived life. But in the end, I saw that it was all "hevil." It was all just wind. It's just... Nothing. It just happens. And then it's gone. And it doesn't mean anything. But the most interesting thing is that it seems to suggest that everything that this guy was saying was true, that it is all just wind, but that somehow, by just fearing God and keeping His commandments, you have somehow solved the problem. I don't think that that's a very satisfying solution. But then I think that that is the great theme of nihilistic literature. People try for a kind of solution, but ultimately, for me, at least, they seem relatively unsatisfying. Fast forward thousands of years and you get Albert Camus' Myth of Sisyphus, which famously ends with this idea of imagining Sisyphus happy. In fact, Camus was celebrated for the starkness of the opening line of the myth of Sisyphus, that there is one serious philosophical question, and that is suicide. Because everything else, you know, how many dimensions there are to space, whether abstract numbers exist, all of that is secondary. The most foundational question is whether or not you're going to, as he once put it, have a cup of coffee or kill yourself today. You look at the seeming arbitrariness of the world around us, the way that the environment and the organisms within it seem to just sort of almost randomly evolve according to literal just battles for survival. I think people want something a little bit more than that. They want something which feels worthwhile, that's somehow sort of justified by some universal principle. There's almost like a moral element, that it's a good thing to be alive, that it's a good thing to live a meaningful life. And that kind of thing, I think, is very difficult to ground objectively. In fact, if somebody ever asks me how I might console myself in the face of these existential woes, genuinely, at least personally, it is in agnosticism. It's in the fact that I do not know the first thing about why any of this exists. Of course I don't, you know? And sometimes people ask me in a context on a podcast or on a stage or something, implicitly as if I'm going to have some answer, as if I've like worked it out and I'm going to be able to communicate that to people. And I'm interested in philosophy, so I might have read something that helps to elucidate a concept or I might be able to put a word on something that you've been thinking but didn't know was, you know, also thought by other people. But we're doing the same thing here and ultimately I have absolutely no idea what the ultimate answers are. And so that kind of consoles me. And I suppose I'm just not convicted of nihilism.

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