Writer Wendy Syfret had never been a believer in 'Aha' moments before she experienced one herself a few years ago.
Walking home from work one night, and feeling somewhat disillusioned with her lot in life, she came to the realisation that it just didn't matter.
One day she'll be dead and no one will remember anyway. Welcome to generation burnout.
Australian writer Wendy Syfret's new book is titled Photo: Supplied
Nihilism has existed in one form or another for hundreds of years, and it's back in fashion, especially with Millennials who have become known as the burnout generation.
Syfret joins the show to discuss her new book, The Sunny Nihilist: How a Meaningless Life Can Make You Truly Happy, and how nihilism can be used as a weapon against our obsession with meaning.
“Life has no meaning, nothing matters, everything is just chaos and it just exists,” Syfret tells Jim Mora.
But rather than that being a “huge bummer”, it can be liberating, she says.
“Nihilism can be a weapon against our obsession with meaning in modern day life, and particularly the way that our very human and very understandable desire to find meaning in our life can be commodified and sold to us and used as a way to manipulate us and tell us what our lives are supposed to look like and how we're supposed to be happy,” she says.
Her ‘aha’ moment came as a “noisy anxiety” began to swell in her, she says.
“I was obsessed with my job, put everything into it. It was a complete definer of my life, I've been told that my work was important, that I was important because of the work I did, that everything was so vital and you know, you're changing the world.
“And it became a way to exploit me, you don't need to pay someone as much when you tell them that they're important, meaning becomes this very thin currency that you can pass over to people that distracts them from actually saying, wait a second, like, why am I working 14 hours a day and only earning as much as a waitress?”
One day she was walking home and her stress levels were “next level”, she says.
“I wasn't sleeping, I could barely eat, I was so miserable, at a level of stress that you would think would be associated to someone who was very important, which I really have to stress, I was not.
“And I was walking home one day, just literally on the edge of panic attack, thinking I've got to get through the door before I actually collapse, like I can't breathe.
“And this thought popped into my head, oh my God, who cares? One day, you're going to be dead, no one is going to remember any of the things you're supposed to complete today. No one's gonna remember you. No one's gonna remember this presentation, or this article or this assignment. This is all just going to disappear one day, and none of it matters. And as I said, it sounds like it's grim but I was shocked to be just completely overwhelmed by a sense of calm and freedom and peace.”
We have become fixated on meaning, she believes.
“We get meaning and value confused. And something I say is, I think things are meaningless, but I do believe things have value.
“Your job has value, someone is paying you for it, you should respect them, you have made an agreement to do a job for a certain amount of time. You come to it with, again, a level of respect and kind of commitment. And then you expect from your employer to give you back, again, that level of support, commitment, and hopefully a livable wage.
“And I think when you actually take meaning out of it, it can make that exchange feel a lot clearer and a lot more respectful.”
Photo: Allen and Unwin
Nihilism makes the world smaller and bigger for her, she says.
“It kind of returns you to yourself. So, it lets you think in the moment what right now is making me happy, what is valuable? What do I need to protect and cherish and spend time thinking about; and that might be managing to drink this cup of coffee before it gets cold. It might be spending time with someone you love, it might be eating the perfect peach on a summer's day.”
It is not about endlessly validating your ego, she says.
“What else has value to me, what else might not be meaningful in this very romantic sense of the word, but is something that I want to protect and treasure?
“For me, I'm very interested in environmental activism, the protection of the planet, community engagement around those issues. That's something where I'm like this is bigger than myself, it's more important than myself. I can focus on this beyond myself.”
She is respectful of people with faith and herself comes from a religious family, she says.
“I think a lot of these things give you this sense of, again, whether it's a horoscope or a biblical scripture, this sense of a second life, or a second world or we're just moving through this thing.
“And this present moment is just something we need to endure and kind of fix. So, we can get to the next better thing.
“And I think where nihilism comes in and sits opposite that is it can say to you stop looking at the grass being greener on the other side, and actually pause in this moment and be like what is beautiful and special and nourishing.”
She hopes people will take one simple message from her book.
“It's just a way to recognise the things in your life that truly make you happy, and to hold them like clearly in your hand and not let all this noise and all this dogma coming from other people clutter that away.”
Wendy Syfret is a journalist based in Melbourne, she's currently editor in chief of Rise, an online sustainable magazine. She used to be the managing editor of Vice Asia and she's written for The Guardian, the ABC, British Vogue, the Boston Globe.
