Why a Nihilist Had a Baby

Sure, my life might be meaningless. But what about hers?

Before I was consumed by the way parenting culture intersects with all the other beautiful and nefarious forces in our lives to make us feel celestial and insane, I was consumed by the void. Or rather, nihilism. 

If you’ve followed my work for a while, you might be aware that somewhere around 2020 I stumbled into the strange position of being an online philosopher. I wrote an article about nihilism that became a book, and then for a while a pretty interesting stage in my career. 

In the years since, nihilism has taken up less space in my work, but not my brain. I remain as committed to it as someone who fundamentally doesn’t believe in anything can be. 

People are often surprised to hear that. Not only because I’m more upbeat than your stereotypical nihilist, but also because I’m a mum. If you believe that life is pointless, then why create another life? 

I thought about that a lot when I was pregnant. I actually wrote about it when I was about six months along. On a whim the other day I dug up that essay (it was part of my previous Nice Things newsletter) to see how my post baby perspective measured against my pre baby expectation. 

I’m quick to complain about how horrible writing is a lot of the time. But reading back over this essay, I was reminded of one of the most valuable things art can offer: A way to communicate with our past and future selves. I found it interesting to revisit, so thought I’d share it here to see how it exists in a different time, space and audience. 

Here’s my piece, “The Pregnant Nihilist”, from January 2022.

I’ve spent a lot of the past three years thinking about nihilism (you might have noticed). At this point in an ongoing global pandemic, I’m probably not alone there. Nihilism, at its most basic, is the declaration that existence is meaningless. In turn, the ideas, systems and institutions that direct and dictate our lives (religion, family, work etc) are essentially empty vessels. Instead of lauding them as unquestionable forces of human nature, they’re coolly viewed as the creations of people (mostly men) who lived very different lives to ours a long time before we were born.

In short: everything you believe is an invention and a fantasy. The only real truth is that there is no truth. We're just chunks of meat, drifting through a chaotic void (nihilists love voids), bumping into each other on a cold indifferent rock, waiting out our ticket until we eventually die and are forgotten.

You can see how the general vibe feels at home in 2022.

Here’s the twist though, I don’t find that outlook petrifying. In fact, my relationship with the philosophy has been one of the most freeing and constructive of my life. I discovered nihilism at a time when I was drowning in meaning. Like many people, I was obsessed with living a life that mattered. My days were carefully negotiated studies in the pursuit of purpose. Every minute was considered and qualified, audited and judged.

My job wasn’t an exchange of effort for cash, but a personal journey to influence the culture and enrich myself. As a faithful disciple of the market of meaning I indulged in narratives that told me this cup of coffee, this can of chickpeas, this designed-to-expire consumer electronic was taking me a step closer to a life I was destined to live. I listened to endless podcasts, read countless essays, and churned through mountains of books committed to the archaeological exploration of what it all meant.

You’d think (or hope) that for that effort I was at least grazing against enlightenment. I was not. This well-worn journey left me feeling awful, exhausted, confused and financially and emotionally wrung out. The pursuit of meaning and purpose wasn’t leading me down a golden path, it was scrambling my brain.

I write about this in more detail in my book, but the crib notes version is that my search for meaning brought me to the brink of a total breakdown. That was until one day a strange new thought popped into my head: who cares, one day you’ll be dead and none of this will matter.

In another circumstance perhaps it could have sounded like a cruel taunt, sprung from an exhausted mind on a dark day. But in that fragile moment is offered an unexpected, but  transformative, sense of relief. Suddenly I could see my life for what it was: a pointless, meaningless, blink of existence within an indifferent and expanding universe that would soon leave me (and my personal concerns) behind. I felt amazing. A nihilist was born.

Across the next few years I explored nihilism’s past and present, diving into its toxic manifestations and positive impacts. This work led me to reconsider my understanding of love, god, work, time, ambition, joy, pleasure and pain. The experience transformed my life. Stripped of a greater narrative, each day felt like it existed singularly for me, passing by once, a rare and beautiful thing, never occurring again, so needing to be fully appreciated in the moment. It also resulted in that aforementioned book (available now, buy one for a friend!).

Amid all this empty-headed mindfulness, I’ll admit that accepting your own pointlessness isn’t an easy task. There’s a reason why humanity has dedicated millennia to the exploration of religion, spirituality and political thought in the hopes of avoiding the idea that existence is ultimately for nothing. But if it's one thing to (eventually) accept that your own life is pointless, it’s quite another to accept that someone else's is. Which is where I found myself last August, when I realised I was pregnant.

As a public-facing nihilist, it wasn’t surprising that a common response to my happy (although pointless) news was questioning how this commitment to meaninglessness gels with the decision to have a child. Choosing to bring a baby into the world is an inherently optimistic act. You’re not only saying that this life is good enough for me, but it’s good enough for a terrifyingly delicate creature who I will love more than any other chunk of carbon on Earth. Doesn’t sound much like nihilism.

I’m writing this at 26 weeks pregnant. In those six and a bit months I’ve grown to love my baby in a way I couldn’t have imagined. When she kicks, hiccups or my free pharmacology-funded app tells me she’s the size of a bunch of bananas, I marvel. Everyday – between the back aches, dizziness and bloating – I’m shocked by the precise engineering of my own body. Its ability to follow aeons of hard-coded biological information, to grow and nurture this impossibly complex being, astounds me. I feel connected to my child, my partner, my mother, and the countless birth parents I’ll never meet who have existed across history, quietly living through their own unique imprint of this shared experience. I also know my pregnancy is a meaningless act. My child’s life, like my own, is pointless.

We both exist at random. The result of well timed sex that happened to occur in a moment when the egg and sperm that created us felt particularly active.None of this makes me any less excited to meet her. If anything, it makes me more.

As established, more than anything nihilism makes me feel free. It reminds me that my life doesn’t exist to be lived in a certain way, to fulfil a set of demands or follow a correct course. It’s random, but it’s mine.

Having a baby is less freeing. My body physically tethered to another, my mind roped and confined. From the second I spotted that double blue line I was met with a tidal wave of rules and expectations. These surging messages insist that every act is a potential mistake, every decision a life-changing choice. Even the smallest misstep off the correct road could be a catastrophic event that would damage my child, and mark me as a vile failure, incapable of undertaking the sacred act of ushering in the next generation.

Pregnancy has a way of rerouting all attention to you. The only thing swelling faster than your belly is the feeling that you’re the centre of the whole world.

A nihilist knows this is trash. Just like with everything else – love, god, work, time, ambition, joy, pleasure and pain – much of the stress and sentimentality we collectively hold for babies (our own or others) is just another invention. A set of behaviours we observe and repeat because we’re told it’s the correct way to think, act, and feel.

The truth is, history will not remember this child. They will not impact the rotation of the earth or the angle of the sun’s rays. In the scope of time, they will be forgotten. So will their achievements, victories, triumphs and failures.

Like with all other parts of my life, this nihilistic outlook doesn’t make me sad. Her life, like mine, feels like a random but precious gift. Given for no reason beyond meaningless chance.

With that in mind, I don’t worry so much about what she will and won’t achieve. If she’ll be the right kind of baby, or me the right kind of mother. Yes I’m still glancing at the odd book, stumbling through car seat recommendations and making plans (not even a nihilist can avoid any baby planning) to keep her as safe as possible. But beyond hoping for health and happiness, I know there’s little point in considering the meaning of her life.

I gaze (over my bump) into the void and know there is no point to any of this. There’s only a limited amount of minutes we’ll have together. There's peace and intimacy in that. The remaining metrics are those that serve us in the fading moment: are we happy, well, safe and loved?

I’m excited to explore this chaos with her. Anchored in the pointlessness of our linked existence I accept that neither of our lives contain meaning. We don’t belong to some cosmic plan. We belong to each other. Well, at least until she’s 13.

Thanks for stepping back in time with me! Next month we’ll be back in present day and looking at how beauty and wellness culture markets to kids (well, parents). As always, I’d love to know if you have any thoughts or feelings about it.