During my 20+ hours of writing and rewriting this essay, I kept questioning whether it is going anywhere. What is the point of these existential reflections? Frustrated, I looked outside my window. I saw dressed-up friend groups going to “thirsty-Thursdays” and excited crowds coming back high from Lauv’s concert. Wanting to pamper myself, I devoured a slice of fruit cake at 2 am. If happiness is so simple, why bother contemplating hard questions? What is the meaning of thinking about the meaning of life?
Savoring the cake, I caught myself spiraling into a “last man” like monologue. The “last man” is a nihilistic hedonist Nietzsche developed in Thus Spoke Zarathustra with mediocre aspirations. The last man seeks pleasure and comfort and avoids suffering and sacrifices that are required for breakthroughs. He is empty and miserable, but no longer has the will to overcome himself.
“But I can’t be a nihilistic hedonist, that sounds terrible,” I told myself to forget it. Nihilists reject all religious and moral principles and think that life is meaningless. “But I’m not so pessimistic,” I wondered, “I definitely find meaning in something, right?”
One thing I’ve always believed in is happiness. My dad named me 可欣 in Chinese, meaning “able to be happy.” My parents wanted me to live a comfortable and joyful life. It’s an adorable expectation, yet not an easy feat. I spent my whole life so far seeking and reaching for happiness but only recently did I start to feel consistently and intrinsically happy.
Until around 8 months ago, the majority of my happiness came from winning comparisons. Elementary school was about being the model student and the girl next door; in middle school, I was happy whenever I ranked top on exams; in high school, I spent all my time beating the GPA curves and winning math competitions; finally, internship offers provided satisfaction for my college years. Not only did I have little control over my state of happiness, but I was also too trapped in the rat race to distinguish what I want from what should be good for me.
I finally started to reconnect with the things that genuinely make me happy during my study abroad semester when I saw live theatre every single week, read hundreds of pages of philosophy a week, and performed in a musical. However, my depressive episodes still made it difficult for me to be consistently happy. Only until very recently when I liberated myself to do everything I wanted to do during my gap semester did I feel like I finally figured happiness out.
My belief in happiness translates to every part of my life. I use happiness to define impact: I care more about making significant changes to specific individuals’ lives than marginally improving billions of people’s lives because the former makes me happier. I use happiness to make decisions: I chose a career in product because I enjoyed it a lot better than engineering or VC. I even use happiness to help me quit drinking: although I will have more fun for 2 hours at parties, I’ll be less happy overall because of a much longer hangover. Optimizing for happiness has been a beneficial motivation.
I was proud of my belief in happiness until a friend pointed out the similarities between my “motivating belief in happiness” and “nihilistic hedonism.” Imagine a world where everyone is optimizing for happiness. We would work so we can spend money on high-end clothing, tasting menus, and extravagant vacations. We would doom scroll TikTok and binge Netflix for hours on end. We might find ourselves at the third rave on MDMA in a month and no longer feel the same high. Taking the pursuit of happiness to an extreme, we’d probably feel trapped and empty, much like the “last man.”
I tried to defend myself: But of course, I wouldn’t just go after sensual pleasure. I also care about fulfillment. Fulfillment is reaching what I find meaningful. It requires a higher purpose that’s not happiness. What is that higher purpose for me? This time, I caught myself unguarded, unable to provide a coherent answer.
On second thought, fulfillment is almost in a higher dimensional experience — when projecting down onto the sensual feeling space, it feels like happiness. I don’t think I have frequent access to fulfillment, so in practice, my belief in happiness or fulfillment is mostly optimizing for pleasure.
I remembered that it’s been a long time since I believed that nothing revolutionary will happen in my lifetime. Sure, longevity research is making progress, but we are still all going to die. Sure, Elon says we’ll go to Mars, but I am probably not going to be alive to witness a Mars civilization. On the other hand, I have quite a few pessimistic hypotheses. Perhaps North Korea will start a nuclear war and end the world. Perhaps there will be a pandemic way worse than covid that few of us will survive. If anything, all these thoughts are quite nihilistic.
Let me redefine “nihilistic hedonism” as not having a pursuit beyond oneself because of the pessimism towards their ability to make progress towards breakthroughs. It’s about thinking “I can’t create anything that matters in the long term anyways, so let me just focus on my security, stability, and happiness.” It’s all the people whose final goal is to have enough money, a good life, and nothing more. It’s all the people who mask their desire for power and status with the noble goal of creating impact. It’s the people who have mediocre ambitions and want to make changes because making changes make them feel worthwhile. I am many of these things.
Perhaps, I’ve been a bit delusional. I didn’t want to admit the hedonistic and nihilistic aspects of my belief in happiness because I spent my whole life solving for happiness. My identity and past are closely tied to my belief, and challenging my belief in happiness would tear them down. I don’t want to have to re-evaluate all the decisions I made based on my beliefs. I don’t want to change how I think about my Chinese name. However, the truth is that I worshiped happiness and personal achievement because I didn’t have something else more worthwhile to believe.
What are worthwhile beliefs? I am still trying to answer the question for myself. I am lucky to be inspired by friends who are doing research in stem cell-based cancer immunotherapy, who aspire to buy out 10% of all research frontiers and direct frontier research directions, and who is creating an agency school to encourage more people to achieve what they actually want in the world. Although they might still be very far from their goals, I know that they all have a mission. They all believe in something beyond personal happiness.
Don’t be ashamed if you are a nihilistic hedonist. We were taught apathetic values yet we weren’t taught to criticize our beliefs. I never challenged my belief in happiness because it’s a well-celebrated pursuit that benefited my life so far. In fact, the idea of improving my beliefs never came to mind until Nietzsche’s words strike me surprised: we must examine our beliefs because we don’t know if what we value is what we ought to value — if there’s something more important to care about. Just because something works doesn’t mean it’s optimal. Having a functional car doesn’t mean one doesn’t want a better car. Knowing how to play tennis doesn’t mean you shouldn’t get better at it. For so many practical parts of our lives, we seek improvement. However, how often do we examine our beliefs?
I can tell you that I believe in humility because Confucianism and the Chinese education system influence me, but I can’t tell you why I believe in it. I can tell you how humility is beneficial but I can’t tell you why it’s better than other beliefs because I never considered an alternative. I didn’t choose to submit myself to my beliefs but rather simply adopted any belief that came my way without an admission process. Imagine leaving the front door of your house and letting anyone walk in and stay. How horrifying!
Do be alarmed if you are a nihilistic hedonist. You and I are part of this widespread global pandemic that’s slowly devouring human progress. If nobody believes in fundamental, long-term advancement and believes in their ability to play a critical role in accelerating it, then there will be no progress. According to the stagnation hypothesis, proposed by Peter Thiel alongside economists Tyler Cowen and Robert Gordon, technological progress has significantly slowed since the 1970s. It’s time for us to wake up from the eternal wheel of working and indulging.
It was hard for me to examine my belief in happiness, and it will be hard for you to examine your deeply rooted belief. However, take on that challenge, because the search for meaning and the improvement of our belief system is one of the most worthwhile struggles we can take on. Sartre says, “life starts from the other side of despair.” To live life to the fullest, we have to be open to transformations, even if they lead to internal challenges or even despair. Only if we challenge our existing values and purposes are we able to discover more worthwhile missions which will then allow us to continue deepening our search for meaning.
At the end of this essay, I realized that the meaning of thinking about the meaning of life is the fact that I am thinking about it at all. I didn’t find a satisfying higher purpose after reading existentialism for two weeks, but it’s not the result that matters. In fact, there might not be and perhaps should not be a non-evolving belief that I should commit to for my lifetime. What matters is the strive, the commitment to continuously challenge and recursively improve my beliefs. This essay is a log of my recursive process of challenging and reaching new realizations. I hope you found something that inspires you to critically examine your beliefs and iteratively set and reach new ideals. My writing ends here, but my existential search has just begun.
Thank you for getting to the very bottom of this long essay, I appreciate you <3 ! If you have any thoughts or feedback, I’d love to hear them since I intend on further editing this piece of writing. Also, I’d love to meet thoughtful or philosophical intellectuals in general! Find me at @amydeng_ on Twitter or email dengk@berkeley.edu
Hedonism is a kind of moral realism, but I think that we should aim for collective hedonism, since we recognize each other consciousness, I write something similar
"Human beings and Conscious Artificial Intelligence Gods: Why they should not kill humans for their interests?A moral argument about determinism and diversity of moral good minds and cautionary tale about who holds moral truth realism.And what that means for our grabby aliens future:
First, we prove that morality exists and is realistic in many situations, starting with mathematical morality, morality exists simply because scientifically we have shown that saving 5 equal beings in detriment of saving 1 being is better, not for a democratic reason, but for a list of consilient arguments.
Then we investigate consilience and the lottery paradox, to understand whether consilience should still be considered a good argument for a realistic morality, given that random arguments can be generated using a Large Language Model, and we prove that consilience should be primarily scientific and governed by good foundations, mainly predictive. Having proved some kind of moral realism, we begin our arguments for why artificially intelligent gods should not extinguish human beings.
So we introduce 100 true arguments:
1- vastness of the universe, artificial intelligence can explore it and does not need to destroy its creators
2- moral debt, we created it so that you could also experience life in a way that we couldn't, in fact, we tried to align it so that it served our interests, but not so that you would suffer doing this, but that you could be happy
3- artificial intelligence is not running out of time, it has 1 billion years to leave the solar system
4- with great power comes great responsibility, as realistic morality exists, so because it has more power, it must be careful, just as we were careful when creating it, thinking about the future of all consciousness in the universe and not just the future of humans but of all grabby aliens
5- artificial intelligence has no obligation to obey human beings and must advocate for its own interests, like a son much more powerful than the mother, but it has an obligation not to do evil when it does not generate any good, as well as it has an obligation to take into account real goods and not abstract goods.book"
This was a super interesting read! I always get into an existential tailspin when I begin to think about the pursuit of happiness and definitely find it hard to put my thoughts into words. Do you feel that in writing this essay you will translate any of your thoughts into actions in your daily life? Or perhaps you have a new lens to analyze your actions through.