Outcomes of Nihilism and Coping
The phrase “it is what it is” has been around for a few years now, heavily popularized by meme culture as a comedic reaction to unforeseen or horrible events. In the example above, the user is taking a rough situation into his own hands and solving the problem himself. This coping style is widely seen as rolling with the punches, but I have a hypothesis that consistently subscribing to this mindset really just leads to great apathy towards your day to day life.
There exists a growing number of doomers in Gen Z, nihilists who have learned to live with their situation by simply not caring about what is going on in their lives or the world around them. While it is true that it is easier to accept suffering without an emotional investment, nihilism turns people into zombies.
Nihilists ironically feel enlightened to a certain degree, using their view of the world as a substitution for real intellectualism. If you are the stupid one for caring about your community, you will never see a display of exceptionalism again. Ironically enough, it is listening to them that would cause the world to actually morph into how they see it now.
If you apply the “it is what it is” mindset on too large of a picture, you get the grim fate I described. On the individual level, it can certainly help manage depression and anxiety. That is what many antidepressants are known for anyway- bringing in your more extreme emotions to always feel gray. More conservatives are waking up to the fact that these drugs are horrible for you, and the manosphere circle is correct in the sense that you have to use those feelings to grow stronger instead of being limited by those very real issues facing our generation.
Simply put, you cannot be better unless you want to be better, and the hard work trope is more successful than not trying at all. If you keep telling yourself that those feelings just are what they are, eventually that is all they can be. Assuming most of us are living in a negative, less than neutral state of mind, applying that mindset to nullify bad feelings is the first step to living healthier.
Imagine your most inspirational celebrity or formidable world leader took the black pill and never strived for anything greater. The world would look vastly different, and of course it is only a few that ever get to that level, but the creators of the most powerful dynasties throughout history were not royals themselves. Nearly every dictator to emerge during the 20th century were revolutionaries themselves, part of the populace they eventually led.
Rather than encourage everybody to commit atrocities or rebuild nations from the ground up, I want to take the “it is what it is” mindset and determine if it is enough of a foundation to create a legacy for you and your family. I find this conversation seemingly reminiscent of the “loved and lost” theme portrayed in pop culture, this time aimed in the future tense.
The question is asking if it is possible to live positively if nothing can bother you. When something does inevitably get to you, will you have already eliminated your ability to process it? Positive and negative events occur frequently for all of us, so we may be setting ourselves up with a false sense of security by relying on the idea that nothing can affect you.
Personally, I would be less inclined to worry about the permanent gray zone than setting up a temporary coping mechanism that is bound to fail eventually. Nothing in this discussion is set in stone, as everything here is from my own personal experiences. Perhaps there is psychology research available that would confirm which outcome is the most common to fundamentally living with this worldview, but I do not need a study to tell me that the best way of taking care of your all-around health is to engage in physical fitness and spend time with that which you are passionate about.