Poke wrote:
Our species--rather, ALL species--will one day cease to exist.
One day, the whole game will be absolutely and irrevocably over.
Every achievement of mankind, every bit of knowledge, every good deed, will eventually fade away like a summer's rose.
In the meantime, we're just playing in a sandbox.
Your point being?
See, this is why I loathe nihilism. Granted, pretty much everything you said is true-- but the attitude behind it sucks. So what if all that we build and experience will someday be dust? Isn't that all the more reason to enjoy what you call the "sandbox" while we can? If you focus on the final destination instead of your encounters along the way, you're going to miss out on a lot.
In his essay
Le Mythe de Sisyphe, Albert Camus suggested that there are really only three options when faced with the inherent meaninglessness of life and the absurdity of humanity trying to impose its values on the world around it. You can find yourself a religion or belief system that espouses belief in some sort of deity-- but Camus argued that this was a form of "philosophical suicide" because it necessitates the abandonment of reason and empirical evidence in the pursuit of a rational answer to the meaninglessness. Another option is to sink into nihilism and eventually come to its ultimate expression, suicide. But that, too, is irrational; in death, the absurdity no longer exists, because it stems from the condradiction between our desires and the natural laws that govern life and the universe. If we remove ourselves from the equation, the contradiction no longer exists, but we are not around to enjoy the problem being solved. That leaves us with one last alternative-- to acknowledge and constantly challenge the absurd, and to live life to the fullest
in defiance of the burden of the knowledge that we are all destined to die someday.
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Mediocrity is a petty vice; aspiring to it is a grievous sin.