wearepaladin:

elerena:

elerena:

bigbigbigtruck:

jhameia:

ignescent:

higgsboshark:

The thing about knitting is it’s much harder to fear the existential futility of all your actions while you’re doing it.

Like ok, sure, sometimes it’s hard to believe you’ve made any positive impact on the world. But it’s pretty easy to believe you’ve made a sock. Look at it. There it is. Put it on, now your foot’s warm.

Checkmate, nihilism.

I know I just reblogged this, but I thought about something to add: This is true of so many things. Everything we do that’s creative at all is a stand against entropy. . You probably can’t fix the world, but you might be able to mend a sweater, or fix a broken toy, or hell, make your bed. And any creative action is a spark of light against the void. it doesn’t have to be the best thing ever, it can be a doodle on the side of a receipt, it can be a cup of tea – but it’s something done, something made, something fixed. Nothing else in the world may be better form the tiny thing you’ve done, but the tiny thing still exists. There’s a tiny spiral or a little turtle on a receipt. There’s a pair of pants that button. There’s a warm cup of tea to drink, there’s a sock and a warm foot. Our existence is these tiny moments, strung together against the dark of night.

Make something.

When I was in grad school, I took up baking cookies as a way to make friends in the department really quick. A professor told me that during HER PhD she had also taken up baking as a way of keeping sane. A dissertation takes forever to write, you can sit at the computer for hours with no result, and it’s painful to think about. Baking, however! In a few hours you have actual material results. You can touch it, smell it, eat it. Nom.

This is a huge part of why I love weight training AND housecleaning. Quantifiable work, visible result.

there is literally not a single thing in these posts that is inherently incompatible with nihilism

I mean these are almost word for word EXAMPLES of existential nihilism

There are several reasons why not. For one thing, the authors do not agree and actively spurn the notion of Nihilism. That in and of itself is disagreement with existential nihilism’s conclusion that there is no meaning in the universe. You could argue that finding their own meaning is an example of existential nihilism, but they are not finding their own individual meaning but sharing examples of how they keep their sanity/find purpose as a shared meaning, which is against contrary to the root ideas of nihilism.

If the shared philosophy stated above could be anything, I’d argue it’s actually Absurdism, which is all about raging against cosmic midnight, holding tiny lights against the infinite dark and, accurately, completely, declaring victory for all time.