Nihilism and Life's Meaning

In the movie Everything Everywhere All At Once, the main character’s daughter, Joy, experiences an existential crisis that causes her to go down an unyielding path of self-destruction. After experiencing every possible version of herself in the vast multiverse, she comes to a single conclusion: Nothing matters.

I’m sure many of us have felt this way. The burdens of societal expectations, to work, to study, to care, weighs down on us and accumulates into a sense of disillusionment in the various oppressive, Kafkaesque systems that make up our society. We feel like each day drains us of every drop of energy, as our eyes are forced upon to experience this nightmarish, painful reality, eroding our will to live. We feel like a tiny cog in a vast machine - irrelevant and replaceable. 

And in the grand scheme of things, it is true.

We are but one of countless lives that have existed, are existing and will exist on this planet orbiting around one of countless other stars, in one of countless other galaxies, in the seemingly unending expanse of our universe. A single ember that will extinguish as soon as it is lit. We are inconceivably tiny in comparison to the unfathomably enormous scale of the universe. Every action we take, no matter how important it seems to us, will inevitably be grossly insignificant in comparison to the passage of time of our universe. 

When we think about it this way, it’s easy to succumb to despair. It’s easy to drown in the suffocating wave of hopelessness, to fall into that pitch black hole of nihilism. We start to ask ourselves, does life even matter? Is life worth all the trouble and pain and grief when it all amounts to nothing? If life doesn’t matter, why can’t I just end it all now?

Well, maybe our lives don’t matter.

In the grand scheme of things, that is.

There’s a set of poignant lyrics by Linkin Park that sums this up:

“Who cares if one more light goes out, in a sky of a million stars? It flickers, flickers.”

“Who cares when someone’s time runs out, if a moment is all we are? Or quicker, quicker.” 

“Who cares if one more light goes out?”“Well, I do.”

To put it plainly, the fact that we don’t matter in the grand scheme of things, does not matter. An obvious but often overlooked truth is simply that no one lives forever. With what limited time we have on this Earth, our interactions with others knowingly or unknowingly change the course of our lives. Human beings instinctively seek joy and fulfillment, and our ability to provide them with that joy means that we do have the power to impact the lives of   our families, our friends, maybe even strangers we’ve never met. In that intimate, human sense, we do matter.

Amber Cheng

3 Unity

2025