It’s a perishable product.

Nihil, or, the state of nothingness, like meditative states, is valuable to spend some time in occasionally, where we can drop our pretenses of knowing, and become immersed for a time in a cognitive state of repair and restoration. Offloading the mental load of carrying meaning through the world, dusting ourselves, and our values off; a kind of values decontamination perhaps. Better analogies to follow.

But as a religious view (and it is making a meta-physical claim, so I have no qualms about calling it religious) that nothing has any meaning is inherently false.

The simple fact that this statement will piss off anyone invested in the religion of Nihilism is evidence of that.

If nothing has any meaning, then nothing I say has any meaning, and should be of no affect, and yet, to say it’s false causes effect.

The counter-argument is that we attribute meaning, and so that’s just the meaning the person being effected has attributed, but that’s a post-hoc justification. The fact remains that unless you continually search out, and remove meaning from your life, it, like plant life pushing through the soil of the seemingly barren earth, will continue to emerge.

That’s why an -ism is invariably required to continue to feed the demand for the supply of nihilistic ideas.

Think of Nihil more as a state of harvest maybe. Or maybe it’s more crop rotation… The emergent values and meaning have been played out, and, to the degree that they bear fruit, and the fruit is good, we continue in comfort allowing those values and meanings to continue to thrive uninterrupted. But where the fruit that is being borne from the things we hold to have meaning, or the values we permit to continue to emerge and compete across our subconscious landscape, but as the environment changes, the things that emerge don’t bear fruit, or the fruits are not acceptable in the meaning/value exchanges we trade on.

Pushing that analogy around a bit there… There’s a lot of directions this line of thinking is wanting to pull, which is, to me, an indication of high alignment with fairly solid, and/or fundamental, models of reality.

So, Nihil is, maybe, the act of clearing the field after harvest, and sure, we can decide what values or meaning to sew, or we can, if we’re brave or stupid, or a little of both, we can leave nature the hell alone, and see what emerges… but something will always emerge, regardless of what we want to try to enforce onto our meta-physical landscape.

The thing of it is, unlike the field where the tendency is for weeds to emerge unless a valuable crop is sewn, and the fields tended, the thing that emerges on our meaning landscape is a representation of what is authentically valuable and meaningful to us.

Nihilism is the selling of pesticides to attempt to create a scorched earth environment on your meaning landscape out of fear of the responsibility that emerges when one suddenly finds themselves with a garden to tend. (but lacking the tools, knowledge, experience or desire) Some feel helpless in the face of the changing seasons, where eventually our values play out their lifespan, and the land seems barren during the winter, and we feel lost and afraid that perhaps meaning will not re-emerge.

But as with any cycle of life, meaning will always find a way, no matter how much Nihilism you pour into your soul.

And you’ll always have to buy more, because it’s a perishable state you’re being sold.