Nihilism is painless

Erik Kain

Erik writes about video games at Forbes and politics at Mother Jones. He's the contributor of The League though he hasn't written much here lately. He can be found occasionally composing 140 character cultural analysis on Twitter.

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8 Responses

  1. Jaybird says:

    Alternate take on this:

    How long did his paper keep him alive?Report

  2. Jason Kuznicki says:

    Does death have chocolate? Because if it doesn’t, Mr. Heisman has a tough argument to make.

    More seriously, I recommend the tetrapharmakos. It’s always worked for me.Report

  3. Alex Knapp says:

    So many questions raised by this, both sarcastic and serious. And is it wrong of me to be intensely interested in reading the book? In particular, is it strange that I’m dying to know whether he took on Camus or if he ignored the existential argument against suicide completely?Report

  4. sidereal says:

    Occasional moments of life are quite awesome. I’m sufficiently confident that death contains no such moments.

    End of treatise.Report

  5. barb says:

    Not everyone enjoys being alive. Just like not everyone likes item A or item B. Just because you like being alive, and it certainly seems a reasonable assumption that living beings might preference being alive, that isn’t always the case.

    Although I would have to say that I can’t help but feel long term dysthymia, depression, or some other mood disorder would be involved somehow or other.Report

  6. E.C. Gach says:

    Having not read the book, but being very interested, it seems worthwhile to note from your excerpt, ” If life is truly meaningless and there is no rational basis for choosing among fundamental alternatives,” that It’s a compound statement with two propositions (that may or may not be linked according to his reasoning). The first is that life is meaningless, the second, that there is no rational basis for choosing.

    Even if the first is debatable, the second seems on pretty strong grounds, and that seems to have been the trouble for him.Report