How to overcome nihilism

1. Nihilism as a daily illness of the soul

In academic philosophy, nihilism can be divided into many layers: ontological nihilism, epistemological nihilism, existential nihilism, political nihilism, aesthetic nihilism, and more. Those distinctions matter, but the focus here is more ordinary and more urgent. The nihilism under discussion is the inability to feel the meaning or purpose of one's own life. It is the sense that the soul has nowhere to dwell, that the future has no real outline, that one does not know where life is going, and that everything feels inwardly empty.

In everyday life this condition shows two main symptoms. The first is depression in the plain sense: nothing feels interesting, motivation weakens, and one keeps living without really wanting the life one is living. The second is the formation of what the source calls a "troll personality." This is the person who dislikes everything, dismisses everything, and feels compelled to sneer at every project, every value, every ambition, every claim to significance. From a psychological point of view, this is not strength but a defense mechanism. The troll cannot build a convincing meaning for his own life, so he gains a fleeting sense of superiority by tearing down everyone else's. First he sprays himself, then he lies on the ground and sprays you. He blackens the world and then laughs from the ruins.

The report also stresses that this spiritual weightlessness does not only damage people on the margins. It eats away at the creativity of ambitious professionals, intensifies modern anxiety about survival, and leaves even outwardly functional lives inwardly unmoored.

The point of philosophy, then, is not to decorate despair with abstract vocabulary, but to intervene strategically in a crisis of meaning. The source material imagines five philosophers as five doctors. Each doctor first offers a diagnosis of the cause of nihilism and then writes a different prescription. The approaches overlap, but they speak from different angles: faith, desire, vitality, freedom, and absurdity.

This should still be taken as an introduction rather than a final word. Nihilism is a massive issue, far too large to exhaust in a single hour-long program or a single note. What follows is a compact review of major nineteenth- and twentieth-century humanistic philosophy, rewritten into smoother English without dropping the examples, jokes, digressions, or practical edges that give the original its force.

2. Kierkegaard: from objective rationality to subjective faith

Kierkegaard's diagnosis begins with a target: the rationalist, objectivist, and holistic metaphysics that dominated his time, above all in Hegel. In everyday speech the word metaphysics is often used loosely, but in the philosophical sense at issue here it means a picture of the world divided into appearance and essence. The visible, messy, changing world is treated as secondary, while behind it stands a more real order that is unified, eternal, pure, beautiful, and capable of grounding meaning. Such a metaphysics also tends to promise a universal explanatory system: whatever strange phenomenon you bring me, I can place it in the system and explain it. In that spirit Hegel develops Western metaphysics to an extreme. Everything that exists is supposed to be rationally intelligible inside one grand whole.

The source offers a helpful analogy. Hegel's philosophy is like the authoritative textbook you study in school. It is thick, systematic, scientific, rational, and comprehensive. The teacher has already marked the key points, ranked the questions by difficulty, and implied that if you master the whole syllabus from elementary school through doctoral study, then you will know how the world works. Life becomes a game of leveling up by passing one exam after another. Rationalist metaphysics promises a complete roadmap to the meaning of life in exactly this way.

Kierkegaard thinks that promise is an illusion, and that the illusion itself helps produce nihilism. Real life does not present itself as a set of textbook problems with correct solutions waiting to be discovered. You graduate and suddenly face choices that no exam ever prepared you for. Should you look for work, take the graduate entrance examination, or aim for the civil service? If you work, should you choose a state-owned enterprise or a private one, the internet industry or the "real" economy? If you pursue more study, should you stay in your major or switch to a more promising field, remain in China or go abroad? If you aim for the civil service, should you take a lower-paying post near home or a higher-paying one far away? If you are about to marry, should you choose Xiaofang or Xiaoyuan when both are admirable and no rational scorecard can definitively rank one above the other? You cannot choose both. There is no standard answer hidden offstage, waiting for better information. Whichever option you choose will generate its own life and its own regrets.

This is why entanglement, hesitation, helplessness, and anxiety are normal states of life. The source says that we live inside complex versions of the trolley problem, except real life does not kindly remove irrelevant variables for us. The problems are tangled, thick, and underdetermined. Reading mathematics, physics, philosophy, Plato, Aristotle, Kant, and Hegel will not magically reveal the one correct path. Posting a question online and waiting for the highest-rated answer will not do it either. There is no universal textbook answer to how a particular individual should live.

Kierkegaard's deeper point is that each person is a unique and lonely individual. Truth, in the existential sense that matters for a life, is subjective. A path that fit Jack Ma's life cannot simply be assigned to yours as homework. Rationalist holism creates the false image that you are not a singular self at all, only an average person to whom the same formula applies as to everyone else. Once that illusion takes hold, we forget concrete individual existence and become unable to live without a textbook in hand. Then, when the textbook fails us, nihilism arrives.

In a neat shorthand borrowed from the source, if Nietzsche later says that modern nihilism begins with "God is dead," Kierkegaard's version begins with "Hegel is dead." The system has failed, the textbook no longer works, and the individual must decide without universal guarantees.

His prescription is a return to inwardness, subjective truth, and what he famously calls a leap of faith. In the original context that faith is faith in God, but the logic is broader. Major decisions are not settled by complete rational proofs, because the reasons available are always partial and vulnerable. This is why the source gives the comic example of a wife asking why you chose her rather than another woman. If you pull out a notebook and explain that the left page listed Xiaofang's pros and cons, the right page listed Xiaoyuan's, and the net utility of marrying Xiaofang was slightly higher, then you have not demonstrated love; you have turned marriage into a business transaction. Any rational answer can be turned against you. If you say you chose her because she is more beautiful, she can ask what happens when someone more beautiful appears. For the decisions that shape a life, what finally matters is not an airtight argument but a decisive and irrational commitment: I do not fully know why, but I am moved toward this and I stake myself on it.

Kierkegaard therefore rejects cheap faith based on cost-benefit calculation. He has no admiration for attempts to prove God's existence by reason, or for Pascal's Wager, which tells us to believe because the expected payoff is favorable. That kind of belief is still accounting. It is like choosing a spouse by arithmetic. True faith is bound up with oath, risk, and total commitment. In this sense Kierkegaard stands close to Tertullian's famous line, "I believe because it is absurd": not because absurdity makes belief true by itself, but because only a belief that is not secured by calculation can reveal the quality of a person's commitment.

The Chinese report sharpens the contrast. Rational calculation treats life as a business, a game of parameter comparison and risk management. It leaves the self anxious, hesitant, and enslaved to an objective system. Kierkegaardian faith treats life as a mission. It demands a leap that cannot be justified in advance by spreadsheets, but that produces existential steadiness precisely because the person has thrown himself into it. In the broadest modern sense, this need not mean religion. It can mean finding a calling, dream, or task one is willing to stake a life on. As the source puts it in a pop-cultural register: dreams come out of love, and love is never fully rational.

3. Schopenhauer: desire, suffering, aesthetics, and asceticism

Schopenhauer's diagnosis of nihilism begins from a different place. To understand it, the source first takes a step back to Kant. Kant distinguishes the world as it appears to us from the thing in itself. We know phenomena through the forms and categories of our own cognition: color, shape, touch, smell, taste, extension in space, duration in time. An apple can be red, smooth, fragrant, sweet or tart, heavy in the hand. But once we ask what the apple is in itself, apart from all appearance, our knowledge breaks down. Space and time belong to our way of knowing, not to the thing in itself as such. Kant therefore remains agnostic about the ultimate essence of reality. The thing in itself is like the first driving force that gives rise to representation, while eluding all direct description.

Schopenhauer inherits Kant's distinction but radicalizes it. He claims that the thing in itself can indeed be named, and its name is will. By will he does not mean a conscious plan like wanting a promotion, a raise, or a romantic partner. He means a blind, bottom-level, unconscious, purposeless striving to continue existing. This is the will to live, Wille zum Leben: a pure impulse toward survival and persistence. It drives reproduction, growth, movement, and the ceaseless birth and death of things. The source compares it loosely to Darwinian natural selection or to the tendency of living systems to resist the increase of entropy, while warning that the comparison is not exact. The point is that the world is not quietly resting in rational order. It is surging under a blind pressure to continue.

Once reality is understood this way, a grim ethics follows. Human beings imagine that they are free and rational, but in fact they are instruments through which the will to live pursues itself. It lures us onward by desire. The strongest expression of this is the will to reproduce. Love, sexual attraction, marriage, and courtship become tools through which life seeks more life. The source jokes that your enthusiastic likes, coins, and public praise for your goddess or god are not primarily expressions of rational agreement but signs that the reproductive drive is using you. Fairy tales stop after the prince and princess marry because reality after fulfillment is much less magical.

Schopenhauer's most famous insight is that life swings like a pendulum between two states: the pain of unsatisfied desire and the boredom that follows satisfied desire. If a goal is not achieved, we suffer. If it is achieved, the satisfaction quickly fades and a new hunger takes its place. The source gives the example of studying two years for the graduate entrance examination. Before success there is anxiety, fear, and pain. After success there may be three days of joy, and then life returns, flat and unfinished, prompting the next desire: romance, status, a different future. One whirlpool empties into another. There is no final landing shore. This endless cycle is, for Schopenhauer, the cause of nihilism.

His prescription is therefore not to intensify desire but to negate the will to live. This is not the same as suicide. Suicide, he argues, does not deny the will; it is desire's final convulsion, an extreme attempt to escape unbearable frustration. It is surrender, not liberation. Schopenhauer instead offers two medicines. The first is aesthetics, which the report aptly calls an intermittent painkiller. In serious art - poetry, music, painting, drama, tragedy - we can temporarily suspend our practical interests and personal cravings. We do not immediately rush to judge, consume, or comment. We become disinterested spectators. If one really enters into Oedipus Rex, for example, one does not post silly live comments asking who the villain is and then fight in the barrage; one is drawn into fate, tragedy, and human fragility. Art introduces a distance from the self and offers a brief inner peace.

But aesthetics is only temporary. Once we leave the theater or exhibition hall, ordinary desire returns. So Schopenhauer's second and ultimate medicine is asceticism. Here his deep debt to Hinduism and Buddhism becomes unmistakable. If suffering is born from craving, then liberation requires the extinction of craving. One must renounce not only luxury and ambition, but the most forceful appetites, especially sexual desire, since reproduction is the clearest channel through which the will to live perpetuates itself. The source phrases this with deliberately comic bluntness: quit pornography, stop consuming what inflames the appetite, do not expect romantic fantasy to deliver the meaning of life, and when the object of desire suddenly shows you favor, do not convulse. If one can truly give up individual willing, then one reaches a state of no-self and no-desire, a "nothingness" that is not despair but calm - something close to Buddhist nirvana.

4. Nietzsche: God's death, the lie of the beyond, and the overman

Nietzsche begins partly from Schopenhauer and partly against him. As a young man he was transformed by reading The World as Will and Representation and even wrote Schopenhauer as Educator, later calling Schopenhauer his first and only educator. But he eventually broke away because he found Schopenhauer's conclusion too life-denying, too exhausted, too close to a Buddhist ascetic refusal of the world. Nietzsche agrees that life is structured by will, yet he reinterprets the will in a radically different way. Instead of a negative will to survive, he proposes a positive will to power: a tendency to expand, create, intensify, overcome resistance, release vitality, and become stronger. Life does not merely want to preserve itself. It wants to express force.

This difference grounds Nietzsche's diagnosis of nihilism. His famous proclamation that God is dead is not a cheerful slogan but a grim announcement. For centuries, people took the meaning of life to come from an eternal world beyond this one. Earthly life was short and unstable, so meaning had to be anchored in something transcendent: God, heaven, salvation, a permanent realm of truth. The more diligently one lived here, the more one hoped to be rewarded there. But modern science and the Enlightenment eroded that world. When God dies, the transcendent guarantee disappears, and Europe enters an age of nihilism that Nietzsche expects to unfold across generations, even across two centuries.

Yet Nietzsche immediately goes further: the problem is not only that God has died, but that belief in the beyond was itself already the cause of nihilism. The Chinese report puts this sharply by calling it the bankruptcy of the lie of the other shore. The source explains the point with a salary-and-bonus analogy. Suppose you were content to receive your ordinary pay before the New Year, but your boss then promises an extra fifty thousand in year-end bonus. You work the whole month in gratitude, only to be told later that the bonus never existed. Now you feel not merely neutral, but robbed. In the same way, the world beyond produces nihilism because it teaches us to despise this life in the name of a fabricated one.

Nietzsche's polemic therefore reaches beyond Christianity to metaphysics as such, especially Platonism. Plato divides the world between unstable appearances and a higher realm of Forms: invisible, pure, eternal realities that grant meaning and truth to changing things. In Raphael's School of Athens, Plato points upward toward that realm. Christianity, in Nietzsche's famous formula, becomes Platonism for the people. Both invent a higher world, then judge this world by the standards of that fiction. And because the real issue for Nietzsche is vitality, nihilism becomes any worldview that devalues life, weakens force, and teaches human beings to turn against their own becoming.

The cure therefore has two stages: destruction and creation. First, one must smash the idols of the beyond. This includes metaphysical systems, religious hopes, and even life-denying versions of scientific rationality when reason itself becomes another idol. Nietzsche's subtitle to Twilight of the Idols says it clearly: how to philosophize with a hammer. The lies have to be broken. Only then can the second stage begin, which is the creation of value on this side.

That is where the overman, or Ubermensch, enters. If God is dead, then the overman becomes the meaning of the earth. The overman is not saved from elsewhere and does not ask the empty heavens what to do. He becomes his own legislator. He stands on the hard ground of this world, creates values from within life, redeems himself, and says yes to becoming. The will to power is not a doctrine of domination in the crude social sense; it is the deep tendency of life to create form, intensify itself, and affirm its own force. After the death of God, that force no longer needs to apologize for existing. It can, as the source jokes, finally open champagne.

Not everyone celebrates this. Nietzsche contrasts two broad moral styles. Slave morality fears self-legislation, distrusts strength, and hides inside values imported from beyond. The source places Platonists, Christians, and even Schopenhauerian ascetics in this camp. Master morality belongs to those who dare to face bleak reality and "dripping blood" while still affirming life. Here the source explicitly recalls Lu Xun's line about the true warrior who dares to confront both the bleakness of life and the blood that flows within it. It also echoes Romain Rolland's claim that true heroism is to love life once one has recognized the truth about it. Nietzsche's answer to nihilism is thus not retreat but a harder, more creative yes.

5. A brief aside on philosophical timelines

At roughly this point, the original source pauses for a practical aside. Since the larger "Big Questions" format imagines philosophers gathered in one meeting, some viewers may want a quick grasp of when these thinkers lived, who came earlier or later, and how Chinese and Western figures line up historically. To meet that need, the source recommends an app called Full History, especially its "Full Philosophy" section. The app places philosophers from ancient and modern times, in China and abroad, along a single timeline, thereby spatializing time so that one can see at a glance who lived when. It lets users compare figures such as Kant and Dai Zhen, or Anselm and the Cheng brothers, swipe sideways for plain-language summaries of major ideas, and tap a philosopher's portrait for a fuller account of that thinker's work.

6. Sartre: existence, nothingness, freedom, and action

Sartre's diagnosis is startling because he does not treat nihilism as a contingent failure that occasionally befalls human beings. He says that human existence itself is, in a sense, nihilistic. This is what lies behind the famous existentialist slogan that existence precedes essence. Sartre distinguishes the being of objects from the being of persons. A cup has an essence before it is made: it is designed to be a cup, a container for holding water, and even if broken it remains a broken cup. Its essence precedes its existence. Human beings are not like that. No one comes into the world with a fixed script already installed. A human being is always in the process of becoming a good person, a bad person, a programmer, an artist, an office worker, a teacher, or something else. One is what one makes of oneself through living choices.

Sartre therefore says that a human being is freedom. He does not mean freedom as merely one attribute among others, or as the ordinary capacity to pick fried chicken over spicy hotpot. He means that the very structure of human existence is freedom because human existence is nothingness. The source deliberately compresses these ideas into one chain: existence, nothingness, and freedom belong together. There is no fixed essence beneath us, only an open project. That can sound uplifting, but Sartre insists that it is also a burden. Many people do not want this freedom because freedom means responsibility without guarantee. It means there is no final comfort zone in which the self can simply rest.

This fear produces what Sartre calls bad faith, translated here as self-deception. We hide inside labels: I am just a worker, just an uploader, just this kind of person, just trapped in these circumstances. We hand over our full weight to an identity fabricated partly by others and pretend that we are objects with settled essences rather than beings oriented toward possibility. Sartre's response is severe. You cannot surrender yourself to a label, because no label exhausts what you are. Man is condemned to be free. Freedom is not a prize you earn. It is the sentence built into your condition.

Unlike thinkers who try to overcome nihilism by abolishing emptiness, Sartre treats this emptiness as the very basis of dignity. If human beings had fixed essence the way cups do, life would lose much of its meaning. The source compares this to the film Arrival, imagining that you could somehow see your entire life in advance: your career, your spouse, your children, even your death. That might sound stable, but a life that can be read off at a glance would be less like living than attending your own life as a spectator. Meaningful life requires openness to possibility.

Sartre does not say that you can simply will yourself into any external success. Freedom is a freedom of consciousness and projection, not magic. You may not become a billionaire because you choose to, but there is no point at which your life becomes a finished and fully determined object. You can always make a difference. You can always take a different line. For this reason Sartre becomes a philosopher of action. The proper response to nihilism is not to wait until meaning appears, but to act and thereby shape the field of possibility. The source reduces the lesson to a practical slogan: recognize the situation and do it. The Chinese report adds a modern application: if career burnout makes you think "I am nothing but my job," Sartre's answer is that your position is only a label. You remain free to redefine the pattern of your life through action.

7. Camus: absurdity, resistance, and the happiness of Sisyphus

Camus was a contemporary of Sartre and is often grouped with the existentialists, though he himself rejected that label and, strictly speaking, wrote philosophy mostly through novels, plays, and literary essays rather than systematic treatises. The keyword around which his diagnosis turns is absurdity. Absurdity is not simply a silly event. It is the felt rift between the human hunger for meaning and a world that remains silent. The world in itself is neither absurd nor meaningful. It simply is. The absurd arises when a being who constantly asks "why?" meets a universe that offers no final answer.

This produces a profound sense of estrangement. The source dramatizes it with familiar scenes. You are in a meeting, listening to your boss lecture. Suddenly the world seems to go mute. You see the mouth moving, but do not know what language is being spoken. Or you step back from your routine - getting up early, squeezing into the subway, fighting with colleagues, listening to lectures, returning home, hearing about clothes bought that day, marrying, having one child, then a second, then a third, growing old, ending in a box - and suddenly ask: what does any of this have to do with me? Who am I? Why am I here? At that instant the world feels utterly unrelated to the self.

Camus gives this experience a mythic image in Sisyphus, condemned by the gods to roll a boulder up a mountain forever, only to watch it tumble back down each time. The gods thought no punishment more severe could be imagined than repetitive and pointless labor. Human life, Camus says, often feels exactly like that.

How, then, should one respond? Camus tests three possibilities. The first is suicide. He opens The Myth of Sisyphus with the claim that suicide is the only truly serious philosophical question, but immediately rejects it as surrender rather than resistance. Physical suicide flees the absurd instead of confronting it. The second possibility is religion or total ideological surrender. Here Camus again dissents from Kierkegaard. To deify absurdity, or to give away reason by leaping into unquestioned belief, is what the source calls intellectual suicide. It is still capitulation.

The third possibility is the one Camus endorses: lucid resistance joined to enjoyment of the present. The deeper source of absurdity is our insistence that life must justify itself by some final purpose beyond life. We demand a grand destination, a hidden meaning, a future guarantee. But that demand itself intensifies estrangement. Camus's remedy is therefore to accept meaninglessness at the highest level and to return attention to experience itself. The meaning of life is not elsewhere. It is in living.

The Chinese report links this insight to the film Soul, where the protagonist spends a long time searching for the one grand purpose, truth, or spark that will explain life, only to discover that life has no single final destination and that the so-called spark is not a cosmic key. Meaning lies in lived moments: a falling leaf, a slice of pizza, the fullness of attention to what is here now. Camus's version is sterner but similar. Once Sisyphus stops expecting his labor to culminate in some higher reward, he can confront the task with scorn toward fate and even with joy. The struggle toward the summit, Camus writes, is enough to fill a man's heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.

The source makes the same point with the example of making a video program. If you constantly ask how many fans it will bring, whether tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, or millions, and whether those numbers prove that the work is meaningful, then you have already turned the activity into a tool for some future justification. But if making the program is interesting even when it brings no money and no grand exchange value, then the question is largely settled. That intrinsic interest is itself a form of resistance to nihilism.

8. A comparative summary of the five prescriptions

The source ends by condensing each thinker into a keyword pair. Kierkegaard diagnoses the problem through rationality and prescribes faith: modern people lose themselves when they trust objective systems more than subjective commitment, so the answer is a leap into a mission one cannot fully justify. Schopenhauer diagnoses the problem through desire and prescribes abstinence: life enslaved to craving swings between pain and boredom, so the cure is first aesthetic distance and finally ascetic renunciation. Nietzsche diagnoses the problem through lies and prescribes the overman: the belief in a world beyond drains power from this one, so the answer is to destroy the lie and create value on earth. Sartre diagnoses the problem through nothingness and prescribes action: human beings are not fixed essences but free projects, so emptiness should be met with committed action rather than self-deception. Camus diagnoses the problem through absurdity and prescribes present enjoyment joined to revolt: the world does not answer our demand for ultimate meaning, so we should stop waiting for a transcendent explanation and live lucidly in the process itself.

The Chinese report also translates these into modern practical advice. A Kierkegaardian move in professional life is to choose work by vocation rather than only by salary tables. A Schopenhauerian move is to step out of algorithmic feeding loops and let deep artistic experience interrupt the appetite machine. A Nietzschean move is to refuse victimhood and create rules for yourself in the ruins rather than waiting for rescue. A Sartrean move is to remember that "corporate drone" or "working stiff" is a label, not an essence. A Camusian move is to stop postponing life to a final goal and instead find intensity in the process of the task itself.

9. Philosophy as a vaccine rather than an emergency drug

The final mood of the source is both playful and serious. It jokes that some viewers may feel more nihilistic after watching a full program about nihilism than they did before. That is possible. Reading a book or watching a program will not instantly cure the void. Perhaps a hotpot dinner that night will do more for one's spirits in the short term. But that is not the real point of philosophical reflection. Philosophy here is presented as a form of health-cultivation or spiritual conditioning. One thinks about nihilism before one is fully swallowed by it, in order to build an inner immune system.

The report captures this beautifully by calling philosophy a strategic vaccine. Children raised in sterile environments, as the proverb says, develop weak immunity; similarly, a soul that never wrestles with nihilism will be more fragile when meaning truly breaks down. Thought does not eliminate pain, but it can cultivate antifragility. This is why the source invokes Nietzsche's line, "What does not kill me makes me stronger." Philosophy becomes a way of rehearsing for disorientation in advance.

Three broad life principles emerge from the report's synthesis. First, refuse label-based existence: you are not reducible to any identity tag handed to you by society. Second, embrace local and limited meaning: do not wait for a final cosmic truth before doing one small, concrete, worthwhile thing well. Third, accept the inevitability of absurdity: the world may be fundamentally indifferent, but that does not prevent you from dancing on the wasteland, loving life, and writing your own prescription. In that spirit, the source closes not with dogma but with an invitation. Which diagnosis fits your own condition most closely? Which prescription feels most reasonable? And if none is sufficient, what better diagnosis and remedy would you propose for yourself?