You've probably met someone who claims nothing matters. Perhaps you've been that person yourself—staring at the ceiling at 3 AM, convinced that existence is a cosmic joke without a punchline. The nihilist position seems intellectually honest, even brave. Why pretend there's meaning when science shows us we're specks of carbon on a rock hurtling through indifferent space?

But here's what's curious. Watch the committed nihilist for a day. They still get annoyed when someone cuts them off in traffic. They still feel betrayed when a friend lies. They still reach for coffee in the morning rather than poison. Their bodies and choices betray a commitment to something—a silent rebellion against the meaninglessness they profess.

This isn't hypocrisy. It's a clue. Perhaps nihilism fails not because we're too weak to face the void, but because the void isn't actually what we find when we look honestly at existence. Perhaps we are, as Sartre suggested, condemned to freedom—and that freedom carries with it an inescapable burden: we cannot stop making meaning even if we wanted to.

Consider the nihilist who writes a book arguing that nothing matters. They've spent months choosing words carefully, structuring arguments, hoping readers will understand. They want their position to be true. But wait—if nothing matters, why does truth matter? Why should anyone bother reading or being convinced?

This is nihilism's fatal internal wound. The statement 'nothing has meaning' is itself a meaningful claim. It asks to be believed. It claims superiority over naive meaning-making. It judges other positions as false. Every word is drenched in the very significance it denies.

The nihilist might retreat: 'I'm not saying nihilism is true, just that truth doesn't matter.' But this compounds the problem. Now they're making a claim about what matters—specifically, that truth doesn't. That's a value judgment, a commitment, a stance. They've already lost the game by playing it.

Nietzsche understood this trap. His famous 'God is dead' wasn't celebration—it was diagnosis. He saw that we cannot simply eliminate meaning and continue living coherently. The death of cosmic meaning creates a vacuum that pulls us toward either despair or the hard work of creating meaning ourselves. What Nietzsche rejected wasn't meaning itself, but borrowed meaning, inherited meaning, meaning we never examined or chose.

Takeaway

The very act of arguing for meaninglessness reveals commitment to meaning. Nihilism cannot be articulated without contradicting itself.

Imagine trying to spend one day without making value judgments. You'd have to stop choosing what to eat, because choosing implies some foods are preferable. You'd have to stop speaking, because words are meant to communicate something worth saying. You'd have to stop moving, because motion implies a destination more valuable than staying still.

Camus captured this when he declared suicide the fundamental philosophical question. If existence is truly meaningless, why continue it? Yet the nihilist continues. They eat, sleep, perhaps create, perhaps love. Their lived existence constantly affirms value even as their philosophy denies it. This isn't weakness—it's revelation.

We are meaning-making creatures at our biological core. Consciousness itself involves discrimination, attention, caring about some things more than others. A mind that truly treated everything as equally meaningless would be clinically dead or profoundly impaired. What we call depression is partly the pathological failure of meaning-making—and we recognize it as illness, not enlightenment.

Even the person who claims to live 'freely' without values is committed to freedom as valuable. Even the one who says 'I just do what feels good' has elevated pleasure as meaningful. We cannot escape through the back door. There is no position from outside meaning from which to declare meaning void—because taking any position is already meaning-making.

Takeaway

We cannot experience or act in the world without constant value judgments. Meaning-making is inseparable from consciousness itself.

So we cannot be nihilists. But this doesn't mean we must embrace naive optimism—the comfortable belief that the universe is fundamentally good and our lives have been assigned purpose by some cosmic authority. That position has its own problems; it denies the genuine absence of given meaning that honest reflection reveals.

What remains is what Sartre called our 'condemnation'—we are condemned to be free, condemned to create meaning precisely because none is provided. This sounds heavy, but consider the alternative. Would you truly prefer a universe where your purpose was predetermined, where your choices were scripted, where meaning was handed down rather than forged?

Authentic existence, in the existentialist view, means accepting this burden rather than fleeing it. We flee through bad faith—pretending we have no choice, hiding behind social roles, claiming 'that's just how things are.' Or we flee through premature despair—insisting meaning is impossible because it isn't guaranteed. Both are escapes from the anxiety of radical freedom.

The path between leads through honesty. We acknowledge the groundlessness. We feel the vertigo of infinite possibility. And then—not despite this anxiety but through it—we choose. We commit. We create meaning knowing it's our creation, and find that this makes it more precious, not less. The painting matters not because the universe cares, but because we made it matter.

Takeaway

Between naive optimism and false nihilism lies authentic creation: making meaning with full awareness that we are its source.

Nihilism fails not because we're too cowardly to face darkness, but because it misunderstands what we are. We are not beings who might or might not have meaning—we are beings who make meaning. It's woven into perception, choice, and consciousness itself.

This is harder than nihilism, not easier. Nihilism offers rest, absolution from responsibility. If nothing matters, nothing is demanded. But we've seen this rest is impossible—we keep mattering whether we like it or not.

What remains is the dignified burden of creation. Not meaning discovered but meaning made. Not purpose assigned but purpose chosen. You cannot escape the workshop. You might as well build something worth building.