Those who have allowed their procreative impulses to become atrophied have separated themselves from the stream of life, and in so doing have run a grave risk of becoming desiccated. For them, unless they are exceptionally impersonal, death ends all. The world that shall come after them does not concern them, and because of this their doings appear to themselves trivial and unimportant. To the man or woman who has children and grandchildren and loves them with a natural affection, the future is important, at any rate to the limit of their lives, not only through morality or through an effort of imagination, but naturally and instinctively.
Bertrand Russell, The Conquest of Happiness
To those without children, Russell claims, their doings appear trivial, as does the world to come after them. This is, I think, an instance of the idea that without responsibilities, one tends to towards nihilism.
Looking at it the other way round, you could instead argue that some view their doings and the world as trivial, and thus choose to be without children. One doesn’t tend towards nihilism without responsibilities, but, it is the nihilistic worldview that leads one away from responsibilities. Hearing some variant of this, in fact, was what first set me thinking about the relation between the two.
Is there a correlation between nihilism and what, for want of a better word, I’ll call ‘irresponsibility? And if so, which way does it work? By nihilism, I mean a frame of mind that believes that nothing, or close to nothing, really matters. And by irresponsibility, an aversion to conventional choices of growing up – family, status, wealth and the like.
It isn’t necessary, of course, that the two need to go hand in hand. There are, I’m sure, plenty of nihilistic people with kids, as there are plenty of people without kids to whom the world and their doings are anything but trivial. Nevertheless, one can speculate on an imperfect correlation.
In a trivial sense, the relationship is obvious. If nothing matters, then children, work, don’t matter, and so, why bother with them? The worldview that perceives everything as meaningless not surprisingly rejects everything.
Is this a self-serving belief? One finds certain choices irksome, and develops the intellectual justifications to defend one’s choices. Which is not to say that those choices are sacrosanct, merely that, in the absence of any compelling reasons, one tends to go with the flow. A departure from convention typically has some idea behind it; the question is whether a nihilistic thought is the driving idea, or merely a fig-leaf to cover it.
And the other end of the stick is that without anything that matters, it’s not surprising the world will seem that way. As Russel argues, to the person without children, their doings appear to themselves trivial and unimportant.
Is this a self-fulfilling belief? Which is to say that, abandoning the conventional sources of fulfilment, one begins to find the world lacking in fulfilment, creating or confirming the impression that nihilism tends to foster.
Causes and consequences always interest me. To be able to pick apart the genuine cause(s) from the ostensible or declared ones. To be, like the forethinker Prometheus, able to guess at the possible, or rather, probable consequences, before things happen – the one superpower I suppose I’d cherish above all others. Self-serving beliefs usually seek to paper over genuine causes; self-fulfilling ones usually stumble into consequences apparent to others though not often oneself, except in hindsight.
Whether it is self-serving or not is something one can only answer for themselves, provided one is sufficiently honest with oneself. It needn’t be, of course, since there is no dearth of motivations that drive a human choice. A genuine guiding idea, however, demands a certain amount of thought to have gone into it, which in turn presupposes significant intellectual effort. In the absence of that – and effort, I think, is something more likely to be absent than present – one turns to facades to cover up, and few are easier and lazier than a blanket of nihilism, that nothing matters, everything is the same.
Whether it is self-fulfilling or not again varies. Though nihilistic thought is typically associated with pessimism and depression (how many happy people gush about the meaninglessness of everything?), the idea that the world lacks a meaning although humans seek one from it, can, as Camus writes, be joyfully liberating. One can, indeed, find their happiness from outside the conventional sources of it, even if, statistically, that is likely to be rare.
Though I dislike broad predictions, I’ll drop one here, with the disclaimer that it doesn’t apply to anyone in particular (least of all you, the reader, that unique individual). Simply going by the odds, then, at the risk of doing injustice to the individuality of each particular case, I’d hazard a guess that any particular instance of such unconventionality is likely to be self-serving as well as self-fulfilling.