How can anyone be a nihilist?

It was almost 5 years ago that I got hired to teach at Pinkerton and upon my hiring I was told I would be teaching two things, US History and Economics. US history I was fairly familiar with but economics was more of a, “nod, smile and agree to do it even though you don’t know a damn thing about it” situation. I’ve learned two things since that day… #1, pretty much everyone who gets hired to teach economics goes in with the reaction I had… #2 I actually really like economics.

Here’s the thing, economics is like meteorology but with people. We create better and more advanced algorithms all the time and become better and better at predicting the weather. While we get it right some of the time and for all our improvements, overall we’re still terrible at it. As it turns out, economics is pretty much the same deal. It’s a whole social science about trying to guess what people are going to do in a given situation and then trying to make them do what “the powers that be” want. The problem is that people are totally unpredictable and q43 often just completely random. There are so many factors that we simply just don’t think of that come into play and as a result economics, for the most part, just totally fails at its primary goal of predicting behavior. It’s called “the dismal science” for a reason. I find it endlessly entertaining when students question things like supply and demand… “Gas prices keep going up but we keep buying it at the same rate, why?” Well, because economics says what you’re SUPPOSED to do not necessarily what you’ll ACTUALLY do. Sure, I can throw out ideas like elasticity and things like that but in the end, people simply aren’t predictable.

This year I got to start teaching psychology and slowly but surely I’ve realized it’s pretty much the same class as economics but just trying to figure out the angle from the standpoint of the brain instead of from “money”. It creates an endless number of concepts and universalities that basically work as stereotypes and some of the time work but really just do a much better job of hoodwinking high schoolers into seeming like there’s an answer than actually explaining human behavior.

So, let’s give all this rambling a point. I’ve found myself thinking about the idea of “The Meaning of Life” ever since I took a series of philosophy classes in late college. (Philosophy is another fun subject, how can I monetize thinking about what I want to do with my life? HEY, I KNOW! I’ll teach people dumber than me about the crap I’ve come up with that they haven’t managed to think about yet!) So my conclusion is… there isn’t a meaning to life. I’m sure that makes me come off as a bit of nihilist but the statement was more an attempt at yellow journalism than what I actually think. We desperately try to universalize the concepts and ideas we come up with. “THIS IDEA APPLIES TO EVERYONE” and honestly, it’s stupid. Our lives are fortunately far too complex to ever be lumped into some group concept of what it’s supposed to be. I want X and you want Z. That’s why all this works. We try to find people who also want X and it makes the path getting to X a lot more fun when we do but sometimes we walk the path alone and that’s OK too.

I guess what I’m saying is, that it’s really easy to see the life of the people around us and think, “Is that how I’m supposed to this? Am I doing it wrong?” and the easy answer is, no, you’re fine. Your path is just a little bit different. No better. No worse. Just different. Take it for what it is and enjoy your version of the meaning of life. Whatever the heck that means.

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