The vibe shift is nihilism

The existential question of our times: What's the point?

Photo by Maks Styazhkin on Unsplash

I’m just going to dive right in with a blunt question: If we’re just going to die in the end, what’s the point?

A related one: If the world is falling apart and we don’t have faith in the future, why bother working to create change, pursue our own life’s purpose, and get up everyday and make choices that align with our values?

It may sound pessimistic, even extreme. But at this singularly weird moment of collective chaos and crisis, low-key despair is in the air—and existential questions are circulating in our psyches. As we’ve discussed before in this newsletter, we are in the midst of a collective dying process; a time when it’s harder to ignore the truth of our own mortality and the essential fragility of life. A quiet crisis of meaning is brewing.

After the election, I half-jokingly predicted to my husband and several friends that we’d see a resurgence of cigarette smoking, both because the old rules don’t seem to apply anymore and also because of the ambient sense of “f*ck it, who even cares anymore” that I was feeling everywhere.

Sure enough—I was right! In my neighborhood in Brooklyn, cigarettes have made a real comeback in 2025, and I don’t think it’s just the French tourists. Increasingly I have found myself steering my toddler around waves of secondhand smoke, and a couple friends have reported similar experiences. (Anecdotal, but still noteworthy.) Then last month, the New York Times made it official: in pop culture, at least, smoking is cool again.

Another example from my neighborhood (yes, it’s Williamsburg): In the past couple years, several Cannabis dispensaries, a Google Home store, and three luxury mattress and bedding stores have opened on my street. This dystopian combo seems to pretty much sum up the collective mood: Does everyone just want to dissociate and hide under the covers, scrolling into oblivion until things go back to some version of normal?

It’s part of a larger vibe shift that I’ve been observing, and I think many of us are feeling.

Even as a fairly purpose-driven person with a healthy sense of meaning in my life, I have noticed myself lately slipping into nihilistic thinking. For me, it shows up mostly around my work as a writer and creative. I’ve felt a strange ennui, a sort of languid questioning of whether any of it really matters anymore. With the explosion of AI-generated content (and the general tsunami of content we’re all bombarded with on a daily basis), it’s all started to feel a bit…. meaningless.

The magnetic pull of my thoughts keeps leading me down the path of slippery existential questions like: What’s the point? Does it even make a difference? Who even cares? With AI-generated content drowning out the voices of real human writers, is writing—perhaps language itself—on the way to becoming completely devoid of meaning? Does sharing stories and ideas even matter anymore, if it’s not going to make a difference? And as a professional writer of 15+ years, what does that say about who I am and the value of the work I do?

The questioning tends lead me back to my own deeper motivations for writing, the inherent value I place on creativity and art-making and wisdom, and the importance of death contemplation. I remember how contemplating mortality keeps me feeling grateful to simply be here, and opens my eyes to the beauty of this impermanent world. So I keep doing it, and using my writing to encourage other people to do it, too.

This kind of questioning—about meaning, identity, and whether any of it still matters—isn’t just personal. It’s part of a larger cultural moment of existential disorientation, a quiet but growing crisis of meaning that emerges when the frameworks we’ve long relied on—work, community, faith—are breaking down, and nothing clear has yet emerged to take their place.

And when meaning is lost, nihilism is the result.

As the Italian political theorist Antonio Gramsci is now often quoted: "The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born: now is the time of monsters." Nihilism is one of the monsters that concerns me the most, because where it leads is despair, hopelessness and moral complacency.

It’s obvious that Gen Z feels this the most, which makes sense given that they are the ones inheriting this world. Younger people report record levels of depression and anxiety, as well as a lack of fulfillment and a sense of hopelessness about their future and economic prospects. And who can blame them? They came of age in a time of climate change, the pandemic, political and economic upheaval, and the takeover of Big Tech. They don’t know if they’ll be able to afford to buy homes or have children, or be able to pursue meaningful work. And with AI is coming for our jobs, our art, literature and films, and our basic sense of humanity, it’s not unreasonable to wonder: What is the point of all this? Is there any real meaning to life—or not?

It’s not just Gen Z. We’re all feeling existential dread and the dissonance of hypernormalization. Even if we want to turn away, these bigger questions of meaning and purpose are almost impossible to avoid.

And the thing is, we shouldn’t avoid them. Because when we lose our old sources of meaning—or they are revealed to be fundamentally unstable—we have a choice. We can either give in to hopelessness and despair (in other words, nihilism), deciding that nothing matters or has any real purpose, or we can discover what does matters to us, even in the face of impermanence and death.

When our own existential dread is met with curiosity rather than resignation, it becomes a catalyst to uncover deeper sources of meaning. The temptation to nihilism holds within itself an invitation to move from Does it matter? to WHAT matters? We’re still here, living our lives—so now what? What do we care about enough to dedicate ourselves to? What is worth doing, even if it fails? How should we spend our time and what should we build in our lives, knowing that it will all come to an end?

Grappling with these questions is exactly how we discover what is worth devoting ourselves to.

What is nihilism?

Nihilism has arisen at transitional historical periods when the ground became shaky and old ways were breaking down, like the turn of the century, when Nietzsche was writing, and traditional religious beliefs were giving way to rationalism and industrialization. And also post-WW2 Europe, when mass disillusionment and questioning led to the birth of Existentialism and the new artistic movements. Right now, we’re at another such inflection point.

In historic times of crisis and uncertainty, there is a strong pull to the view that life is devoid of any inherent meaning, purpose or value. Nihilism often involves skepticism toward objective truth, ethical values, religious beliefs, and social or metaphysical systems of meaning. At its extreme, it can suggest that nothing matters and that existence itself is void of significance.

But there’s a lot of gray area here; nihilism might be more accurately seen as a spectrum of beliefs and behaviors. In fact, it’s a natural response to existential disorientation that can creep into our thinking and behavior in sometimes surprisingly and seemingly innocuous ways.

Nihilism might look like:

• Dismissing or trivializing joy

• Not committing to longer-term plans and dreams because the future feels too uncertain

• As a creative, feeling like “it’s all been done before”

• Cynicism and emotional detachment masked as intelligence or worldiness

• Self-doubt around our own efforts, rooted in a fear that what we do or create doesn’t matter

• Holding ourselves to lax moral standards

• Dissociating from our pain, grief and sadness

• Overemphasizing productivity and optimization, and devaluing anything that doesn’t lead to measurable output (presence, embodiment, emotion, beauty)

At the turn of the century as industrialism and rationalism was gaining speed, the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche diagnosed this way of thinking as a dangerous symptom of the loss of belief in God and traditional moral frameworks in the modern Western world. (As he famously declared, “God is dead.”)

Nietzsche warned that unless we create new values, nihilism could become a dangerous cultural force, leading to authoritarianism and widespread hopelessness and despair—in other words, a political and mental health crisis like the one we’re experiencing right now.

In itself, nihilism isn’t necessarily bad. Both Buddhist and existentialist thought take this lack of inherent, fixed meaning as something liberating, rather than cause for despair. It can help us to shed false sources of meaning to search for something truer and more authentic within ourselves. Existentialists like Sartre and Camus believed that if life has no inherent meaning, then we have both the freedom and the responsibility to choose the meaning of our own lives. Buddhists believe we can become fully awake to reality as it is in the present moment, beyond concepts and stories. Mahayana Buddhists also give their lives shape and meaning by taking the Bodhisattva Vow—a pledge to working tirelessly until all beings are liberated from suffering.

But we need to be aware of the potentially dangerous consequences of nihilism when we get stuck in it, rather than using it as a catalyst—consequences like apathy, escapism, cynicism, an erosion of empathy, hopelessness and despair.

When we divorce life from meaning, we lose our rudder, and we become adrfit and disoriented. Without our anchoring beliefs, we are lost at sea. As Neitzsche put it: “What were we doing when we unchained this earth from its sun? Whither is it moving now? Whither are we moving? Away from all suns?”

The real question of nihilism is: What now? If there’s no inherent, predetermined meaning, and yet, life goes on and we still have years ahead of us, then what? What should we do and how should we live?

Nietzsche saw nihilism not as the end, but a beginning—a reckoning that forms an essential stage before the emergence of truer, more life-affirming values. When meaning fails, we are forced to create new meanings. And the process can actually give rise to our deepest, most authentic selves—and the creations and works of art that reflect that. “One must still have chaos in oneself to be able to give birth to a dancing star,” he said.

The Battle of Nihilism vs. Hope

Knowing this, it’s important to be aware of what we’re up against.

Let’s not underestimate the magnitude of breakdown that we’re experiencing right now. Back in January, an astrologer I follow predicted this year to be a pivotal turning point in human history—2025, she said, represented a “step into an entirely new reality.” (Noteworthy: She fully predicted the pandemic in 2020.)

With the existential threats we’re collectively facing, we’re all going to confront these existential questions at some point.

Knowing that the ship is heading for the iceberg, it’s easy to want to give up. To lose hope, to dissociate, to stop caring because it’s painful to care. That might lead us to escape into end-of-the-world hedonism and party like the Wolf of Wall Street, or on the other end of the spectrum, crawl under the covers and scroll our way into oblivion. Why? Because it’s too painful to feel the deep pain, grief and heartbreak that we feel when we turn towards what is happening.

But the reality is, the ship is always heading for the iceberg. Death is inevitable. The central question—whether in “normal” times or chaotic ones—is: how do we live a rich, meaningful life, knowing that it will all come to an end?

In January, NYU Stern professor Suzy Welch, whose work focuses on helping people find purpose in their lives and careers, recorded a podcast episode inspired by a question she’d been recently asked by one of her students: “Do you ever get tired of teaching all this stuff about purpose when we’re going to die in the end anyway?”

The question stopped Welch in her tracks. And her response is a powerful contemplation for all of us about the choice point we’re being confronted with:

“The idea that we’re all going to die someday, so it has no point, is nihilism. That’s the definition of nihilism—that sort of purposelessness is what nihilism is all about. Not caring about the future. Feeling like the future is made up for us all. There’s just no point to it.

That attitude is a choice. It’s not foisted on you. It’s a choice, just as hope is a choice. And guess what? I said to the student just as I’ll say to you: I choose hope. And I choose it not to be woo woo… I choose it because the case for hope is just better than the case for nihilism. It’s a smarter choice.”

She goes on to describe hope as a “moral obligation”: “We can’t all give up at one time, because then there will be no future, so someone has to have hope. And you know what, it’s gonna be me and it’s gonna be you. It has to be. It’s the right thing to do… it takes a lot of strength to live with hope in these times.”

This choice of hope over nihilism, described in other words, is a choice of love over fear. As Joanna Macy, the beloved Buddhist teacher and environmental activist, so beautifully puts it: “If the world is to be healed through human efforts, I am convinced it will be by ordinary people, people whose love for this life is even greater than their fear.”

Can we heal the world? Maybe, maybe not. Is it worth trying, if not to heal the world, then at least to live our values? That’s for each of us to decide.

Nihilism is easy. Hope is hard. But the people who can find the courage to choose hope in the face of death are the ones who will step up to build our shared future.