Some thread of links has pulled my attention to this music video, titled Important. It's a song where the chorus goes something like:
I am not important, and neither are you
So let's do whatever we wanna do
Bask in our cosmic insignificance
Soak up this blip we're livin' in
'Cause nothing matters anyway
Isn't that great?
This is part of this general idea that we are incredibly tiny in the observable universe, which implies that we are existentially insignificant. 1 But he adds in a twist that this is a good thing, because it means we can just focus on doing what we want to do. Isn't that great?
I can see what he's trying to do, this song is an attempt to salvage the inherently empty materialistic 2 scientific worldview by reframing it. You can tell it's empty, because his "solution" is to double-down on the splitting alienated ego, and "do whatever we wanna do". And instead of "oh no, we might kill ourselves in the near future on Earth, and even if we avoid that, sooner or later something will happen to the human race" he highlights that organic life as a whole is adaptable, and so it will find a way to survive.
I would agree with that latter point, but none of it changes the fact that these are ideas which he pits against existential dread. The former are very shallow, and will quickly be dropped in the face of real despair, such as how people's ideas about Death might reassure them as long as its visceral Reality is out of sight, but as soon as they start to genuinely internalize that they are going to die and that they cannot do anything about it, then suddenly the ideas are of very little value, for after all, we all stand naked in front of Death.
This is also why conjuring up a counter story doesn't work to address the root, especially if it is embedded in the same premises of egotism, such as how people who harbor self-hatred due to being obsessed about their self-image do not change their life by manifesting "positive thoughts" about themselves, or how in this case swinging from scientific objectivism to relativistic humanism, or even hedonism, is simply an escape.
The reason why I believe that this story, and all stories in general, only form a very thin layer of justification is that no one experiences their minuscule size relative to the observable universe. You have to perform a computation to assess that you are a small bleep in the galaxy, which he does in the video, but all of this happens within the mind.
What I suspect is happening to such people is the following: modern life is incredibly alienating, on a day to day basis, and that is what they experience, that is the reality behind their existential dread, and then and only then do they seek an answer to justify it. Even to say that school or work are meaningless is still to take part in the process of narrativization, which is useful and can be accurate, but fundamentally our world is alienating because it separates people from what they would naturally want to do: connect with other people, learn things they are interested in, engage in useful work at their own pace and help others simply because they want to, which is to say, a participatory life. One where conscious quality and communal living are at the center of our lives, rather than serving the technological system and its ever-increasing demands, its byzantine complexity and its overall nihilistic trajectory, or the self-informed self which can only understand more and not beauty, or love, or peace, or simply enough.
In such a state of alienation from participation and living, people then come across a story told by some famous scientist or philosopher who gives them a convincing account of how meaningless our existence is in this cold world, and suddenly their ego shouts: "That's it! That's why I feel alienated! Life is pointless! There is only misery!"
But even what I have written is in an important way also a narrative. To say that we live in an alienating world and that there is nothing we can do within it is also a form of self-justification. Fundamentally, what causes this existential dread is much deeper than just an idea, or even the times we live in. It's really the inherent separation that ego experiences, and which it then tries to put into words, or anything it can grasp, such that it has a problem to solve.
Ego loves the story of meaninglessness because it is better than what it cannot grasp. You would never find an alienated person disengage from the mind and simply shut up, a rather rational conclusion to the premise that life is meaninglessness because what would be the point of communicating it? Instead what you find are people who are obsessed with telling everyone around them how meaningless everything is, because that's how ego is: it's a pattern of tension which constantly maintains itself, through addition or distraction, because to slow down and examine itself would lead to its own death. The mind does not shut up because silence is even worse than despair to it.
In fact, the mind would rather drown in a sea of anxious "rationality" or depressed cynicism than allow something other than its thoughts to be the guiding hand. Even its cynical stories are reassuring because they are still stories, they are still about control and justification fundamentally, but a twisted form of control, such as the illusion of control of the mind turning everything into a thing it can then try to understand, or the human form of control where you feel better than everyone else because you see how everything is fucked up.
The ego needs those isolated things to latch onto because it allows it to relieve itself from any responsibility, blame things, people, all in order to not look at itself. The scientifically-informed ego uses scientifically flavored stories—which dress up as Science, but they only have the aesthetic of Science, ultimately they are just stories that deal with non-scientific aspects of Reality—but other egos do the same of course, though in perhaps less sophisticated ways.
All of this is done as a distraction to not look at the whole, because the entirety of ego is dissatisfaction and alienation, even when it gets what it believes it wants, and that this entire pattern would clue into the fact that ego itself is the problem. If ego could see the loop of desire, the struggle, which leads to an achievement (high), which it then becomes used to and start taking for granted, until finally it feels bored, or sad or lonely (low), until it desires a new thing, if it could see this entire pattern for what it is, and how it keeps happening again and again, ego would have to confront the root of this pattern, which is of course itself.
The solution to this existential dread is not through another story. It's also not through "doing whatever we wanna do", which is an invitation for a monstrous type of self-absorption, the kind that leads to addictions, apathy, lovelessness and ultimately, the life of the living dead.
The solution comes from confronting the false king, seeing his influence on the entirety of your own life, and dethroning it, allowing Life and the conscious I to regain their place. This is often incredibly painful and also confusing. Ego loves stability, predictability, and comfort, so it will scream, whine and make excuses. But at least this works. Better to face the pain than to look for another desperate coverup for the root of the problem.
Thus if we view meaning as living meaningfully, then it definitely exists, but it is not a thing, a state to achieve, or a part of a puzzle which ego can try to solve. It is life as a whole, not just what you like of it, or what you think of it, but the actuality of what is in front of me, which can of course be very pleasant, beautiful and all the lovely qualities we naturally want in our lives, but it is much, much more than that, which is why being told what the meaning of life, even by a very conscious person, often does very little to us, whereas reading an entire story can infuse a sense of aliveness and gratefulness in our lives, even if it is a work of fiction, because there is something in the whole which cannot be captured by the part.
1 I can't say I have ever understood this narrative that our planet being minuscule in the scale of the observable universe implies anything about our significance, or in this case its lack of. I guess what they're implying is that we are some kind of accident which happened in one weeny tiny part of the Universe (which might be infinite but we only see a finite part of it), and that we are not at the center of this cosmic game, which means we do not matter.
2 "Materialistic" is a misleading term for this worldview which is completely in the mind. Our world could better be described as being a form of disenchanted idealism, rather than materialistic. People don't care about matter, they care about the ideas of matter. Even those who seem to care about material acquisition don't really care about the things they collect, they care about the status associated with it.
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Narrative Meaninglessness Mind Science Mismatch Wholeness
2025-10-28