A Weirdly Optimistic Nihilist’s Guide to New Year’s Resolutions

Make yourself the mayor of this year’s ass — or not.

Image by Wayhomestudio on Freepik / Quote by Wendy Syfret

Happy new year to all the WildingOut readers! If you don’t read me, then meh, happy new year still I guess. But you should read me this year.

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Anyhoozy, here’s my next goofy rant…*Ahem, story.

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Happy New Year! New year, new star-spangled McAwesome you. The new year is a time for life reflection, designing positive changes for the upcoming year, and all that philosophical gumbo mumbo-jumbo.

Well, buckle up buttercup, you’re about to get a shitty crash course in nihilism for the happy new year’s cynic. After all, every good year should start out with wide-eyed optimism about our pre-apocalyptic future ahead.

Nihili-What-Now?

I’ll give you the uber-cliff-notes, single-sentence definition of nihilism. If you want to delve deeper into nihilism you could google it. But, time and stuff. If you’re too lazy to enter words into a search bar because life is too meaningless to care (you’re on the right track already then!), then click here.

Nihilism is a philosophical branch that dates back to some old German and Russian dudes. But, this is a crash course. Since I’m not a turn-of-the-19th-century Russian revolutionary — and I’m a lazy mofo — we’ll go with a modern, reductionist philosophical version of it:

“Ni·hil·ist — a person who believes that life is meaningless and rejects all religious and moral principles.”

I’m non-religious. I’m not entirely amoral though — I’m just in the morality camp of ‘just don’t be a dick’. As an armchair nihilist, everything is meaningless, and we are but a mere smudge in the dust of a miraculously tiny yet huge blue marble in the vast expanse of the universe. I find fantabulous comfort in this.

But I’m an optimistic nihilist. Just like Wendy Syfret, author of The Sunny Nihilist: A Declaration of the Pleasure of Pointlessness. I’ll give you her single-sentence explanation of her own personal ‘sunny’ nihilism:

“I’m just a chunk of meat hurtling through space on a rock. Futile and meaningless.”

Life is chaotic — it’s a world without order or plans. Don’t succumb to your fate, because there isn’t one. If everything was pre-ordained or fated — why are you changing your smoke detector batteries this month?

Nothing I can do will affect the gravitational pull of the earth (unless, perhaps, I finally crack my time-traveling conundrum), but I can make one person’s day brighter. Or darker. That’s philosophically speaking of course. I can’t (yet) control the actual sun or clouds.

Image by Wayhomestudio on Freepik/ Quote by Wendy Syfret

I can make myself better — even though in the grand scheme of things, it only makes a difference to me. And maybe a tiny smattering of people in my life. The earth will revolve around the sun, a butterfly will flap its wings in Jakarta all the same, and our choices have no effect on either.

But why ‘happy’ nihilism?

For the happy nihilist, a meaningless existence is freeing. Cast free from the burdens of purpose you can enjoy the moment, take risks, and live messily outside the lines of life. Life isn’t a clean narrative arc — it’s a messy and chaotic freefrawl that we merely make minor adjustments to.

So do your New Year’s resolutions, or not.

I’ll do mine the optimistic nihilist way.

The Optimistic Nihilists’ Guide to New Years Resolutions

As a happy nihilist, your New Year’s Resolutions (NYR) are meant to be freeing. Switch things up from the ordinary burdens of life on earth. Let’s examine some typical NYRs with a sunny-side-up nihilistic disposition:

1. ‘Live Every Day Like It’s Your Last’

I giggle every time I hear this as an NYR. If people acutally did this the economic markets would collapse, and most of us wouldn’t have food to eat — not that it matters since we’d all be toothless from lack of flossing.

In the slightly-less-fatalistic purvey, we can switch this to ‘Make some days balls-to-the-wall awesome’. The harsh reality of life on this blue marble is that some days will suck. The fanfuckingtastic news though, is this: that day will never exist again. You’ll experience that shitty day, and then never go through that same shiznit again. Every day is a new day, the world trudges on, and so must you.

The way human memory works is that we don’t remember every day either. I can barely remember what I had for breakfast. So just kickass some days, and chalk the shitty ones up to one bad rotation around the sun. You’ll have an average of 29,000 days on the planet. Make some of them rock.

2. Get Rich

Being rich doesn’t buy happiness, just good experiences (and Lamborghinis). All building a vast empire does is burn time (and build vanity, and ego), which is the one thing money can’t buy. Money is nothing more than a survival tactic, but in the end — you can’t take it with you. And you can’t buy the years back.

The optimistic nihilist wouldn’t say money is meaningless, just that it is merely a means to an end. Focus on the latter.

Image by Wayhomestudio on Freepik/ Quote by Wendy Syfret

3. Start a Side Hustle

When you assign less value to getting rich it becomes about the ride.

You become free to focus on the experiences in your years…not the Maserati.

This year, pursue a passion, not a financial goal. Something that makes you feel challenged and personally rewarded. You probably won’t get rich doing a side hustle anyway — so make the experience your goal, buckle up and just enjoy the ride.

4. Find ‘The One’

If in ‘the end’ it’s all meaningless and the only purpose is the personal journey — why not have some scintillating company on your march toward oblivion?

While the nihilist in me doesn’t believe in ‘the one’. After all, there are 8 billion people on the planet and you met ‘the one’ at your local Chilli’s? Having a partner in crime makes robbing banks more fun.

An optimistic nihilist would say to bring someone fun along for the ride. Find your Thelma, or Louise. Life is chaotic; the line is more bumpy than it is linear. And fairy tale endings are sparse. So find the Sharon to your Ozzy. Or just find someone crazy enough to be along for the next orbit around the sun.

Resolutely Unresolute

As your armchair expert in a little-less-cynical nihilism, who knows unsurprisingly little about the universe, I’ll end with this. The closest thing we have to destiny is just a collection of the actions we take. Live this year, and beyond, like nobody gives a shit. Because in the grand scheme of things — they don’t.

Do what you want, write what you feel, and just enjoy the bumpy, chaotic cosmic ride.

Make your resolutions, or not. Or say fuck it all — and do the same thing we do every year, Pinky.

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