Hedonism Leads To Nihilism

“Shut up and pay attention to me, Bender.  Look, I love life and its pleasures as much as anyone here, except perhaps you, Hedonism Bot.  But we need to be shut off.  Especially you, Hedonism Bot.” – Futurama

One thing I learned in high school – always date homeless girls.  It doesn’t matter where you drop them off.

I know that lots of people had it rough in high school, that they felt that they didn’t fit in.  They felt as awkward at Whoopi Goldberg at a bris.

Not me.

I’m not bragging, really, it was just how it worked out for me.  I had a great time in class, a great time in athletics, had great friends from nearly every walk of life.  Heck, I even had hair back then.

I was also really lucky with the ladies.  Thankfully there were no small number of girls with daddy issues in town, a drive-in movie theater, and a pizza place.  Of course the pizza was not entirely necessary for a seduction, but a guy gets hungry.  Seducing girls burns up calories.

Let’s add in the last element of hedonism:  beer.

There was a bar where if you had the $5 cover charge, you were of drinking age as long as you weren’t stupid enough to wear your letter jacket.  I should know, because I got in when I was 16.  I went in with my friend’s (who was of drinking age) license.  He was four inches taller than me and was probably sixty pounds less than me.  I wasn’t fat, he was just skinny enough to fit down the barrel of a 12 gauge and not touch the sides.

I dived off the stage at an Oktoberfest party.  I went krautsurfing.

Yes.  At 16 I thought it was a good idea to sneak into a bar holding the license of someone who resembled me only in the fact that they were another human male who had blonde hair and blue eyes and in only those ways.  And that same person who barely resembled me was also walking in with me.

I had no idea what sort of ludicrous story I would tell them if they asked.  “Oh, sorry, I thought I was another person?”  No.  “Oh, when I was at his place I accidentally put his license in my wallet and hid my own license?”  Hmm.  “I was fighting with my multiple personality disorder and physically split into two people?”

Thankfully, the place was nearly empty and the bouncer never asked me for an ID, just took my $5 and stamped my hand.

I saw a drunk caveman walk home once.  It was a meanderthal.

Apparently, I made enough of an impression that night that they never once carded me, ever.  After one night, I was a regular and knew most of the people that worked there by name.  Not so amazingly, about half the people from my social circle made the same discovery, and on a random Friday night, it wasn’t unusual to see a dozen juniors and seniors in the place.  Of course in 2022, the Safety Police would probably summarily execute the owner and the staff, but this was a kinder, gentler, drunker time.

It was life on easy mode.  Plentiful girls with dubious morals.  Cheap beer.  Great success in nearly everything I tried.  I’m not saying I peaked in high school, no.  Heck, I’m not even sure that I’ve peaked yet.  But it was easy.

One thing I did was try to connect emotionally with those frolicsome fräuleins of my hometown.  That seemed (in many cases) like a lost cause.  One night while sitting under the moonlight in the Wonderful Wildermobile, between hickie sessions, I looked up at the Moon and said to my girlfriend at the time, “It’s amazing to look up at that, and think how much smaller it is than the Sun.  How much smaller the Earth is than the Sun.  It’s a fantastic Universe we live in.”

Her response?  “The Sun is larger than the Earth?  No way!!!!”

Okay, our relationship was over pretty shortly after that comment.  And that also changed me.

I bet my old girlfriend thinks Starbucks® is a currency that aliens use.

I had an epiphany.  I was living a life of hedonism.  And although I had a life of pleasure, there seemed to be a lack of meaning.  I had everything that every guy on the football team could desire.

But I felt empty.  Not dead inside, but empty.  I felt that the things I was doing were, while extremely physically pleasing, were devoid of meaning.  It was like being Hunter Biden without being a Biden, smoking crack (or meth), and getting money from anonymous donors for my retarded attempts at painting to try to influence my dad.

I’m betting that this is the first time Scotty and scotch were used to explain nihilism.

The feeling of empty was a tough one.  It helped me see how someone can go from that feeling of empty in the face of pleasure to a feeling of nihilism.  I looked up the definition of nihilism, and came up with more definitions than I had girlfriends in high school.

I’ll give this one, which I found after looking at a dozen (many contradictory) definitions on the Internet:  “as the view that nothing we do, nothing we create, nothing we love, has any meaning or value whatsoever.”  That is the one that mirrors the emptiness that I felt.

It is the inherent danger of a life that borders on the libertine.  What matters if life is so easy?

Thankfully, I’m glad I caught that as early as I did.  I can see easily of how falling down the rabbit hole of hedonism could lead to nihilism.  As I got older, I realized that, whatever definition used, nihilism is the worst of philosophies, and the worst of the human condition.

Even though the Universe is large, and there have been countless years since the start, and, perhaps, countless years until the heat death of the Universe, we matter.

What happens in this world does matter.  We have meaning.  And fighting the good fight for Good over Evil does matter.  Life and meaning are built not in the pleasure, but in the struggle to be better, to do more, to be more, and to add value because we were here.  Those are the stories worth telling – they are the ones that will be sung around campfires in 100 years.

I hope Aaron Burr didn’t name his son Tim.  It would have been awkward to look for him if he ever got lost in a forest.

Never give up, because what we do here matters.  What you do here has value.  Even as we stare at the vastness of a Universe that no one can comprehend, it matters that we are here.  And it matters what we create.

And our love?  It perhaps has the greatest value of all, though it is rarely found in the bottom of a glass of beer, unless there’s a live band.

Did I mention they had live bands at the bar?

Author: John

Nobel-Prize Winning, MacArthur Genius Grant Near Recipient writing to you regularly about Fitness, Wealth, and Wisdom - How to be happy and how to be healthy. Oh, and rich.

22 thoughts on “Hedonism Leads To Nihilism”

  1. It is an important topic – to determine for yourself whether life has meaning, and if so, what that is. Most of my life I have quested after the answer, beginning with ‘what am I?’. I slowly uncovered a truth that works for me and keeps me centered and oriented through whatever life offers. BTW, I am not a Christian, or a follower of any other organized religion.

    Wanting to believe (most Christians today) is not the same as believing. You can tell the difference because a desire to believe doesn’t offer the grounding that actually believing does when life puts you under stress or requires difficult decisions. I think most people never directly face the issue, preferring to accept a package plan even if they can’t actually believe it.

  2. Yep, High School. Those were the days. I really don’t have any complaints about my life. I wasn’t concerned with fitting in, exactly. Me and my friend, we actually walked into liquor stores in our city and acted like we knew exactly where we were headed as if we shopped there all the time, which we mostly did. I don’t think we ever got carded, either of us, both around that 16 year old mark. My cousin who was living with me later (long story) and I used to ride our motorcycles up to a convenience store and wait outside as many have done before and since and asked people to buy us a six pack of beer. It always worked that finally someone would. I was cursed as a young male, in that I could easily talk to girls, but was pretty much honest and forthcoming in my presentation. Therefore upon telling them what I wanted, I never got it. 😎 It wasn’t until I was 21, that I finally got it together. But those years helped form the person typing this.

    1. The key was always to act like you belonged. One of my friends had it down pat: he’d yell across the store to the clerk, “Is Coors Light on sale this week?” Pure genius.

  3. Once we threw our empty Mickey’s into the pond and they were frozen there in the morning for a good chewing out from parents.
    We plucked them out when it warmed up and went about finding out how to procure some more adult beverages.
    Some of the slower kids got picked up by vice police after hanging out in front the liquor store and asking for someone to go in for them.
    Later that night I just shook the pop machine until enough for everyone fell out and skated off on my Santa Cruz with Slimeballs wheels and Independent trucks.
    Honey Chambers picked me out at school due to my new kid in town with Snake Plissken leather jacket and it really was lightning bolts and thunder as I turned off the 49ers and Bengals and learned about the birds and bees.
    Lefty probably never had any fun experiences like these growing up and that explains their misery and quest to make everyone as miserable as they are.

    “Only dust remains.”

    Karl Ruprecht Krönen

    1. One my dad told me to “get rid of” some beer he found in the fridge. My friends and I drank it. Problem solved.

  5. Ah high school. Spending all day locked in a building with several hundred teen-aged girls, back when girls actually looked like girls, and going to classes that required zero actual effort on my part. Getting the whole summer to do nothing. We had no idea how good we had it.

  6. John, I was the opposite: I was the awkward band/drama nerd that did well in class and amidst my own peer group, but not so well out in the larger population. In some ways that was a good thing: my “idiot” phase was delayed until the first part of college and was not quite as idiotic as it might of been. And Ricky’s comment is right on: it can be incredibly easily as a young man to write checks your older self will have to cash for the rest of their lives. I did not have such an incident, but that was by the grace of God, not any doing on my part as I could be as stupid as the best of them.

    The unmitigated pursuit of pleasure always leads to nihilism, it seems to me. If all one is concerned about is pleasure, one does hot have a whit of care about anything else. One simply becomes a large appetite, always looking to be filled and satisfied – and people just become objects to meet that end.

    1. I was friends across the spectrum – I took my D&D friends to jock parties, and vice versa. It was fun.

    1. Hahahahaha! I think 90% of them were letters FROM Penthouse. “As a freshman at a small Midwestern college . . . . “

  9. The two most important days of your life –
    the day you were born, and
    the day you find out why…
    Mark Twain
    I had an absolute blast in high school, what I remember of it.

  10. The US armed forces managed my school experiences, so one high school was awesome (chastely dating a swim team captain, D&D pals, good classes), one was unpleasant (a prison crossed with an anthill) but socially and educationally O.K., and one just sucked.

    U.S. Publuc Schools: 2 stars. Do not recommend.

    1. My local one was okay. Obviously the guidance counselor should have told me to avoid a lucrative career and become a humorist.

Comments are closed.