Some Psychologists are calling the current youth generation as “millennials”. Young folks who were born 1984 and after are being seen as people with a lack of beliefs, a lack of energy, a lack of will power to accomplish tasks and goals. They, par excellence, contracted the nihilism disease which has been too much disseminated on society. In consequence, they are no longer able to pursue dreams, because everything is losing its meaning, its magic, its incantation. They are the “underground” man, as Dostoevsky says. No perspectives accompanied by laziness whose condition was paved by all the conform and protection parents gave them. The millennial is a picture of what we can affirm as passive nihilism.
Nietzsche is well known as “the philosopher of the hammer”. His intentions were to shake all the “idols” society had constructed. For Idols, Nietzsche means all our idealistic system, all that ideals which deny life itself and transport us to a place beyond. Nietzsche wanted us to attempt to the real-life here and now because that’s the only and last one.
I have seen many people making a huge misunderstanding, calling Niezstche as the father of our post-modernism current ideals, and consequently associating Nietzsche’s ideas with this rising of the millennials. Being more specifically, people blame him as the sparkler of this huge nihilism we are living today, but that is not true.
Nietzsche not only fought against this existential state, but also explained it by somehow. Our current nihilism is the consequence of an event that Nietzsche called “The death of God”. Another common mistake is to believe that Nietzsche was the guy responsible for “killing” God with his “hammer philosophy”, but that is a huge misunderstanding also. When Nietzsche said, “God is dead”, he is actually doing a statement about an event that already happened, rather than proclaiming by himself such fact. He is saying that modernity “murdered” God with its freak chasing to reason. They replaced God for Science. Undoubtedly the death of god was one of the most significant “events” from modern society, once until then what people had had as belief systems were depended deeply by the Religion.
The negative outcome of this fact was the rising of this passive nihilism we are seeing. When people say that “the belief in God is not the truth”, we are opening a door to affirm that “everything is false”. The disbelief in God collapsed the belief system of society and that is one of the reasons in nowadays we are seeing a deep and almost an irreversible situation whereby people are no longer able to believe in anything. Everything is seen as an illusion. Our generation is no longer able to pursue a career, a home purchasing, a family building, nevertheless all these goals that for many years made society people be “movement” by somehow. We are in the inertia. We are a sick society, no doubts about it.
But here is the question. Is there any solution for that? Are those possible people overcome nihilism? Nietzsche pointed out one: embrace suffering.
The inescapability of suffering is something that all of us have to be aware of. Whenever we are alive, we will suffer. Life is tragic and malevolent. And many people see this condition as a reason to stuck and stop to dream, cause everything will succumb. Fair enough. Life is tragic and we will all die. So the best option is to surrender and be faithless? That is one option but not the only.
Why not reevaluate suffering? Once we are all in, and we are all going to suffer, why not escape from immediate pleasure and apply our existence for something which will make our life worth living? Is it will bring suffering and pain? It will, of course. But here is the paradox in Nietzsche's approach. When you suffer for something which is worth and you know it will bring value, our brain liberates dopamine, giving us pleasure long term. We tend to believe that pain and pleasure are disconnected, but they aren’t. They are the two faces of the same coin. Pursuing distract behaviors is pleasurable in the moment, but it will bring you suffering in the long term. Try to reverse it. Suffer now and live better in the future. Suffering is something will accompany anyway, but try to direct your pain for something worth, for a goal you want to accomplish and see how more fulfillment your life will be.
Estevão Damacena, 27
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