How to Cope with Meaninglessness 101
Games, Stoics, and weird analogies about biking all in one post.
With a last frantic mouse click, I slew Baal and finished Diablo 2. A feeling of contentment washed over me as I watched the final cinematic of archangel Tyrael destroying the Worldstone. You see, a few months back, the game that I used to play as a 14-year-old got reworked with better graphics and improved game mechanics. But, crucially, the core remained the same so much so that by pressing a single button, you can switch between the old and the new interfaces. Magic!
Even though I no longer play games as much as I used to, I still do enjoy them. And playing the remake of Diablo 2 has transported me into those carefree days of my childhood, where my only issue was how to get more playing time (and my pimpled face, sigh).
Looking back, that particular game - Diablo 2 - was the springboard into the gaming world: shortly after I discovered MMORPGs like MU Online and the mistress of my adolescent years - DotA (back then, only a map in Warcraft 3). I must have spent thousands of hours engrossed in these virtual worlds, slaying enemies, collecting loot, getting better items, and forming relationships with people all around the world. I had inordinate amounts of fun but besides that, I think gaming also scratched an itch I wasn’t aware of back then: a sense of meaning and purpose. Turns out, I’m not alone1.
Fast forward a couple of years (okay, 10 - 20 or so). The sense of meaning gaming so easily supplied is gone now that I have to cope with the realities of being an adult (not a recommended experience): there are bills to pay, work to do, studies to spend time on, and friends to keep in touch with. In many ways, my life should be more meaningful now than it was back then, but it sure doesn’t feel that way. Why? The search for an answer to that particular question has taken much of my RAM over the years. Until recently.
You see, I had an epiphany the other day:
Existence is cruel because it supplies both the inherent meaninglessness as well as temporary means of transcending it.
What I found with gaming, you might get out of a nice meal, sex, meditation, exercise, whatever. The pattern is the same: you do an activity that you find pleasurable and meaningful and get a jolt of dopamine out of it. But sooner or later the feeling of satiety and contentment dissipates.
Hello darkness, my old friend.
Now some people will say: “you must find meaning in the small and insignificant everyday things, for they are what constitute your life.” Sure, you can say that. And I can imagine that working somehow. If you manage to savor each meal and sexual experience and a bout of exercise or meditation and whatever, you can create a continuous string of experiences that overlay the meaninglessness of life. Kind of like putting a feel-good soundtrack over a silent movie. To that I say: but what if what you're watching is a documentary about WW2 atrocities? I think you can do only so much with small things without addressing the root issue. My gaming childhood was, in that sense, running on borrowed time: I was only able to experience the fun and meaning because my circumstances allowed it. But now that I can’t easily immerse myself in alternate universes, the lack of easy access to meaning hurts. There are no cheap ways out of nihilism.
If ordinary everyday pleasures aren't enough to push back against the void, what is? I honestly don't know how much of what I'm about to say is wishful thinking and how much is actually true, but it seems that meaning can be derived from creating - and constantly reaffirming through action - some higher-level purpose.
An example. If you're into saving the environment, you can derive meaning from a plethora of options: you can be a political activist or an environmental scientist. You can join Fridays for Future or Extinction Rebellion. Heck, you can even be someone who recycles. What I suspect, though, is that everything is relative; after you've collected all the low-hanging fruit, you have to keep upping the ante to reach the next levels of meaning2. So, for someone to whom stuff such as environmental degradation doesn't even register on his radar, recycling might feel super meaningful. For a week or so. What's next? Getting a bike. Fine, that's nice. The breeze, the exercise, the newfound love for tight shorts with the padded crotch. All wonderful. For a month or so3. From recycling and biking, you move to changing your diet and proselytizing the benefits of generating your own energy. Basically, you always take the next logical step upwards. But depending on your circumstances and resources, you're going to hit a ceiling of what's possible and achievable within the boundaries you have. What happens then?
Hello darkness, my old friend.
Existence, then, is not only about finding and exploiting cheap gratification (e.g. gaming, food, or sex) that doesn't fulfill your deeper needs. It's also about continuous escalation until you hit a ceiling. For me and my gaming career, this turned out to be hitting adulthood. For you, it might be something else. But the end result is the same: sooner or later we have to come to grips with the meaninglessness of life, and cheap band-aids won’t cut it anymore.
Since I have no clue about how to find “true” meaning in life without said cheap band-aids, I now move on to discuss 3 ways how to cope with the feeling of meaninglessness instead.
1. Turn to Stoicism
The basic notion of Stoicism pertains to the dichotomy of control. This is how Epictetus explains it4:
“Some things are in our control and others not. Things in our control are opinion, pursuit, desire, aversion, and, in a word, whatever are our own actions. Things not in our control are body, property, reputation, command, and, in one word, whatever are not our own actions.”
What if the general sense of meaninglessness is “not up to us” and simply a part of our experience? A stoic solution to this problem then would be to acknowledge this reality and focus on what we can control instead.
A Stoic approach - as I understand it - would be to build resilience. As Marcus Aurelius puts it:
“Everything that happens is either endurable or not. If it’s endurable, then endure it. Stop complaining. If it’s unendurable… then stop complaining. Your destruction will mean its end as well. Just remember: you can endure anything your mind can make endurable, by treating it as in your interest to do so. In your interest, or in your nature.” (Meditations, 10.3)
Wow, harsh. It’s basically the stoic way of saying “suck it up, there are worse things than wallowing in meaninglessness.” But then again, what is the alternative? The alternative is to complain, either to yourself or to others. And while that might give you momentary relief, it’s not a long-term solution. Why do I think this? Well, that’s because that’s what I (used to) do: I thought really hard about why existence feels meaningless. I didn't find any solutions (no surprise there). And instead of collecting my losses, I started - perhaps unwittingly - despairing about the fact. And when I can no longer take it, I need to externalize somehow, and that’s when I start complaining or grab some low-hanging fruit (I heard donuts are great).
And the cycle repeats again. Hello darkness, my old friend.
Anyway, I don’t know about you, but I have a sense that shaking a fist at the heavens in self-righteous rage isn’t something a Stoic would do. But what would they do when the meaninglessness of existence bears down on them?
Two solutions seem to stand out:
Examining your impressions and
Premediatio Malorum.
Let’s discuss each.
Examine your impressions
Again, Epictetus:
“So make a practice at once of saying to every strong impression: ‘An impression is all you are, not the source of the impression.’ Then test and assess it with your criteria, but one primarily: ask, ‘Is this something that is, or is not, up to me?’” (Enchiridion 1.5)
I don't know about you, but I don't feel much control over which thoughts pop into my head nor which emotions I feel. That’s okay, Epictetus would say. But I should always ask myself: ‘Is this something that is, or is not, up to me?’ In other words, can I control it? Well… no.
But what I can do is to identify what I’m feeling or thinking, and examine my impressions. And that brings us to the concept of emotional granularity.
Some studies report that identifying the emotion a person is feeling - say despair, ennui, boredom, or gigil5 - and processing it, leads to a host of positive outcomes. You see, people with greater emotional granularity - those who are better able to distinguish between emotions - have been found to be better at regulating their emotions6. And better emotion regulation has been linked to positive outcomes such as well-being7. It’s not a stretch to claim that the stoic practice of impression examination could lead to higher emotional granularity, as that’s basically what it was designed to do.
Ergo, examine your impressions regularly. Pick them apart, and process them. What’s left after shouldn’t sting so much, as you already know what you’re dealing with: if it’s something you can’t control, leave it. If it’s something you can do, well, get to it.
Now let’s turn to the second, more sinister-sounding technique stoics regularly employ.
Premeditatio Malorum
The phrase literally means premeditation on adversity and consists of three steps.
One, think about the worst-case scenario.
Two, imagine the scenario is happening right now.
Three, talk yourself to indifference and acceptance - since, after all, you can't control the feeling.
In short, willingly expose yourself to your enemy in controlled settings of your imagination. Thanks but… no thanks? Seems kind of masochistic. But let’s examine it a bit deeper.
To me, a worst-case scenario could be that the feeling of meaninglessness causes a serious bout of depression, where the food tastes bland, exercise feels too strenuous, and games aren’t fun. It's really a lousy state that is difficult to get out of. In premeditatio malorum, I would imagine myself going through all that - presumably accompanied by the feelings of meaninglessness that I don't enjoy (yay) - and engage in an inner dialogue of sorts. A question from Seneca seems relevant here:
“Set aside a certain number of days, during which you shall be content with the scantiest and cheapest fare, with coarse and rough dress, saying to yourself the while: ‘Is this the condition that I feared?’” (Letters XVIII.5)
Is this really the condition I feared? I mean, yes it is, but also it's something that stems out of the comforts that I accrued. Why should the feeling of meaninglessness hamper my existence and leave me depressed? There are worse things than that.
As to why this practice should work, think about how phobias get treated. Say, someone has a fear of spiders. She comes to a therapist and, in controlled settings and willingly, gets exposed to spiders. First, perhaps, by imagining them, next by looking at their pictures, and at some point perhaps by being exposed to them in the same room.
The crucial part here is willingness. Because by confronting adversity willingly, you can assert control over it.
What else does our anti-meaninglessness goodie bag entail?
2. Use the Inverse of the Hedonic Treadmill
Another issue I raised is that we use temporary band-aids to briefly escape the feeling of meaninglessness. What's worse, we often overuse them and escalate to a point where we need much more stimulation to achieve the same effects. Take it from me, a guy who went from not knowing what a PC is to sitting in front of it for over 12 hours a day.
So, my take consists of two points: a) limit the exposure to these band aids and b) if you use them, do so mindfully.
For example, I'm big on food8. I love cooking and I love eating even more. I'm kind of lucky in that my metabolism (at least so far) is quite fast and I can basically eat whatever whenever without gaining weight. This often means I ate way more than I needed to, just because I could. It also means that I couldn't really appreciate food since it was always available to me9.
For well over a year now, I am on an intermittent fasting schedule (16-hour fasting, 8-hour eating window). I don't limit my caloric intake during the eating window - I can gorge on whatever I want. But I'm not so lucky during the fasting period, where I have to keep my urges in check. Leaving the health benefits of intermittent fasting aside10, the practice has taught me to be grateful when I eat. I also train my self-control and delay gratification, something I talked about earlier11. As a result, both cooking and eating are way more satisfying to me.
I'd argue the same goes for sex, gaming, exercise, whatever. When you limit the instances of the cheap gratification activities, the negative emotion first shoots up (ripping off the band-aid). But over time, you build resilience, and you'll get to a more healthy baseline that helps you cope with the feelings of meaninglessness.
3. Don't Throw in the Towel Yet
Since the feeling of meaninglessness stems from, surprise surprise, the lack of meaning, finding meaning should solve the problem. Duh. If it were that easy, I - and probably many otters (couldn’t resist, sorry) - wouldn't have to deal with the problem. Anyway, as much as the solution feels and looks ridiculous - especially to someone who has tried to find meaning for years on end without much to show for it - I wouldn't rule out the possibility. For all I know it's possible: some people do seem to find it. I get glimpses of it from time to time. The problem I have is that I've quite a string of failures under my belt. This leads me to perhaps discard opportunities that could lead to something.
So, it stands the reason to keep the exposure to stuff higher than you feel necessary. Go out to parties (if you can that is, looking at you, Covid), talk to people, read and do new stuff. Maybe you will stumble upon something that sticks. At least for a while.
Summing up
It was a helluva run that I had for 10 days playing Diablo - demolishing monsters (and my mouse), looting chests, sweating my chair through. Besides the pauses for masturbating it was quite like my first encounter with the game. Still, I noticed that my heart wasn’t in it. Probably something about not being able to enter the same river twice or some such. But also, after the feelings of nostalgia, awe, and fulfillment dissipated, I was back where I started: not really having any deeper purpose.
There truly are no cheap ways out of nihilism. For us afflicted by it, it’s here to stay. But that doesn’t really matter. What matters is how we approach it. Stoics would say we should learn to accept it as something we can’t control. They would also recommend checking our impressions and regularly playing out adverse scenarios in our heads.
To that, I would add the notion of inverting the hedonic treadmill: we can employ the temporary activities that lift us from the throes of meaninglessness mindfully and sparingly. That way we can build resilience and a healthy baseline that doesn’t balloon into epic proportions. Lastly, as with any decent soppy story, I also said that we should expose ourselves to opportunity whenever possible.
I don’t see myself finding “true” meaning anytime soon and I will probably spend more time and energy on band-aids than I should. But I now realize that the feeling of meaninglessness can be overcome. At least for a time.
And now, if you’ll excuse me, I need to oil my bike chain and shop for a fancy bike helmet.
unless, of course, you become a bike nut, in which case all the power to you and also fuck you for finding meaning that soon
gigil exists, I kid you not. It’s “the urge to hug or squeeze something that is unbearably adorable.”
as you might have noticed since I dedicated an entire post to it: What Do We Know About Making Better Food Choices?
I'd argue you can't appreciate anything much if it's constantly available to you... except for pizza, you can always appreciate that.