I’ve spent fair amounts of my adult life depressed, anxious, neurotic, confused, and in heavy despair… and I disagree with your assessment.

The first paragraph is a good place to start exploring why.

Life is a futile, meaningless game where all action is about a neurochemical reward in one’s brain. Whether one is materialistic or spiritual is irrelevant. It’s all the same: neurons firing gratification patterns in one’s skull.

The neurochemistry vocabulary is modern and scientific. But if you’re thinking how it is to actually be alive, it’s a misleading perspective.

It’s rhetorically useful for a nihilist screed precisely because it ignores the reality of conscious experience.

But let’s consider it.

At a specific point in history, human minds began to understand, through experiment and theory, the microscopic structure of the mammal brain.

There’s a fascinating book called Portraits of the Mind that combines beautiful historical neuroimaging pictures with essays about the history of this science. I found it in the gift shop of a museum. It’s worth getting in hardcover.

Basically… in 1873, an Italian physician named Camillo Golgi invented a chemical method—the “black reaction”—that made the structure of nervous tissue visible under microscope.

Then a Spanish scientist, Santiago Ramón y Cajal, used that method to basically invent modern neuroscience. Going further than just looking at individual neurons, he discovered larger-scale structures in nerve centers, retinas, chicken cerebellums, and the human cortex.

Fascinating stuff. But not a reason to propose the utter meaninglessness of life. Yes, brains are strange wet machines. Everybody knows that now. Yet we go on mostly unfazed.

We can look at such neural images and feel beauty, fascination, and awe. We know that even though our lives depend on such arbitrary material structures, we are not identical with them, and we don't need to fear our reduction to black ink spots in a microscope. We can't escape from meaning even if we want to.

Most people aren’t depressed, extremely neurotic, or nihilistic in outlook. Most animals certainly aren’t. To most people, nihilistic theory is just unnecessary, a byproduct of thinking too much while depressed, or a thought experiment that’s not really connected to their reality.

The concrete reality of being alive is not a “lie”—that’s an arbitrary value judgment.

Philosophers of despair, like Kierkegaard, and in some moments Nietzsche, don’t really offer a profound, deep truth. They express their times, their own anxieties and personalities, their desires.

I’m moved by the works of Ingmar Bergman. Who else makes scenes like the scene in Through a Glass Darkly, when the schizophrenic Karin announces that she has seen God, and he was an evil spider who tried to rape her? Or the preacher in Winter Light talking about the silence of God and Jesus on the cross crying “God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”

Still, I’m not them. God doesn’t really concern me. The nonexistence of God is not a deep problem for me. I don’t have that yearning for religious faith or ultimate meaning. Nietzsche’s murder of God is to a secular person like me simply a convulsion in the beginning of modernity.

I consider nihilism to be just the flip side of faith—an extreme view.

Existential dread isn’t fun. It can be sort of interesting. But it’s not a deep truth or an inevitability. Existential amusement is just as real.