What it is
Existential nihilism holds that life has no intrinsic meaning or value. The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy puts it as beginning “with the notion that the world is without meaning or purpose.” It’s a claim about existence as a whole.
Nietzsche is the name most tied to it. He saw nihilism as a crisis that would wreck cherished values, and hoped people could get through it, at great cost, to values they make themselves. The existentialists after him took up the same question: if meaning isn’t given, can it be made?
How it shows up for me
I don’t believe in a meaning handed down from above, and for a while that felt like falling. What I found at the bottom was that meaning can be made, by hand, in small things. That’s where this whole notebook comes from.