Optimistic Nihilism Will Save Us All
Welcome to the Church of Syrsly!
One thing religion does for you is it makes it easier to accept that you're going to die by disease, aging, organs giving up, or physical annihilation. As an anti-religion person, this deeply troubles me, because I realize there probably isn't anything for me after I die. Dying is the absolute end. This form of thinking drives a lot of people back into religion as they get older despite what they truly believe because they're fearful for their afterlives and simply want to feel good about dying. It's a coping mechanism.
Some people will say you should be religious because what if you're wrong, but what if I'm right? Shouldn't we work toward fixing the whole death problem rather than pretending it isn't a problem? Our bodies seem destined to wither away over time, and we only have a few good decades if we're lucky to truly utilize the knowledge and skills we gain. Do you have any idea how short-lived a decade is? We all spend the first decade just learning to do basic things like walk. The second decade has historically been the years of learning who or what we want to be and how to achieve our goals and also hopefully the years of learning how to be a decent human being. After that, assuming we don't get into a major accident, we start to decay, some of us quicker than others.
If we could nip the aging process in the butt, we might actually get a few centuries to utilize the knowledge and skills we learn for much longer and even have time to learn more. Once that's a thing, scientific progress will speed up over the course of two generations worth of the original societal aging cycle. Even if we simply slow down aging by a few extra decades, it will drastically change the outlook of society as a whole, and we'll probably have to adjust our legal systems to accommodate the longer lives.
In the here and now, we need something to believe in that lets us cope with today's problems without accepting them entirely and without assumptions about the afterlife and spirituality and higher powers and so on. The belief system I would like to propose is optimistic nihilism, which combines the nihilist belief that life has no inherent meaning with a sense of freedom and agency to create meaning and direction using the physical world as your canvas. You can seek to make the world worse or better, but once you're gone, you're gone, so you gotta do your best with the time you got. If you want to spend your whole life being as laid back and chill as possible just to enjoy the world as much as possible before you're gone, that's well within the scope of this belief system and very much acceptable behavior, but you could also spend your time helping society improve by studying law and fighting for people's rights. Whatever your goals are, optimistic nihilism is for everyone, and it offers a way to think above what you owe to your religion. Just do what you think is right.
"But what if I want to be spiritual?" I hear you asking. That's a choice, and it does conflict with optimistic nihilism a bit if you think there's something after death, an afterlife. The real point of optimistic nihilism is to be okay with not having an afterlife and see that we need to work harder to make human lives last longer, even if it's by creating an afterlife of our own on Earth. Ever seen Amazon's show titled Upload? Maybe you've seen .Hack//SIGN? No? Well, both those shows depict a virtual world where humans can go to escape their own bodies. That's kind of the goal of a society that doesn't believe in a made-up afterlife fairy tale. Upload consciousnesses to Matrix-like simulations or MMO worlds and then there's a real, tangible afterlife of our own making!
What do you think so far? Have you always been a Christian or part of another religion and always will continue to be part of that? Do you think you could switch from your current belief system to one that doesn't provide an afterlife? Are you anti-religion already? Does talk of such possibilities scare you? What will you do with that fear of unknowing? Will you be more motivated to pursue your dreams? Will you quit smoking? Quit drinking alcohol? Exercise more? Perhaps study medicine and take up a career in the studies which help lengthen our lifespans? Or will you simply accept that life is fleeting and enjoy it more while it lasts?