Nihilism and the Problem of Meaning

From the opening pages

You are going to die. Everyone you know is going to die. Everyone you dislike is going to die too, although probably not at a time that would make your schedule especially convenient. Your parents, friends, colleagues, former teachers, favourite actors, irritating neighbours and the person who invented the automated telephone menu will all disappear. So will you. A few decades later, depending on your success in producing descendants, books, scandals or unusually durable administrative records, the number of people who remember you personally will begin to approach zero. Eventually your name will mean nothing to anyone. This is simply the standard contractual arrangement offered by biological existence.

The wider situation is no more reassuring. Homo sapiens has existed for roughly 300,000 years. Earth is about 4.54 billion years old; the universe, about 13.8 billion. The Great Pyramid of Giza was built around 4,500 years ago; the Wright brothers flew at Kitty Hawk in 1903; Neil Armstrong stepped onto the Moon in 1969. To us, these belong to radically different ages. To geology, they are practically simultaneous. To cosmology, they are a slight administrative delay.

Nor is permanence waiting for us at the other end. The Sun is about 4.6 billion years old and, in roughly five billion more years, will enter its red-giant phase. Long before that, increasing solar luminosity is expected to make Earth progressively less hospitable. Whatever monuments, constitutions, religions, corporations, national anthems and family archives humanity leaves behind, none comes with an eternal warranty. Eventually even the distinction between people who answered emails promptly and those who wrote “Apologies for the delay” two days later will be lost.