Nihilism and the Crisis of Meaning
The Design
ida
i“I dreamt of a gear, a white hole, a rainbow.”
02
I believe dreams can be a source of inspiration as well as a warning, signs of what is to come. One night, I dreamt of a gear, a white hole, a rainbow. I stood at the upper left of its radiance.
A voice said: “We’ll place idaa in the first house. Among 70 million planets, the first division is yours.”
On a planet with a yellow, foggy atmosphere and mountain peaks hidden in dark clouds, the days grew darker as time passed.
I went into a plane. A cashier stood there, looking at me strangely.
He asked, “Who are you?”
I said, “I seem to be from a different place.”
He frowned. “I’m calling 911.”
“No, I’m not playing around,” I said. “If you tell me which year we are in…”
He said, “64,000.”
“In Christian?”
“Solar.”
“Where I come from,” I said, “my timeline is the 21st century. 2020, in Christian. Are we on Earth?”
“Yes,” he said.
“What happened to us?”
He paused, and said quietly, “A lack of simple purpose.”
A house and a division are both allotments: a sector of a whole that someone else has already partitioned. She is placed in one, by a voice, in the third person, by name.
No summit is ever seen to end. Nothing in the composition changes except the light dying.
The modern man does not see God because he will not look low enough.carl gustav jung
This dream became the basis of my proposal: the meaning crisis and mental health collapse. Are we psychologically fit for the technologies we’ve created?
Nietzsche and Dostoevsky foresaw the spiritual and psychological crisis of the modern world, especially through the rise of nihilism: the belief that life lacks inherent meaning, value, or purpose.
Nietzsche described Europe as moving “restlessly, violently, headlong” toward a catastrophe caused by the collapse of its traditional value systems. He believed nihilism was not an accident, nor a rebellion, but the logical outcome of Western civilization’s ideals, especially Christianity’s pursuit of truth: the disintegration of a system that had sustained humanity for millennia. As science evolved from faith, it turned against its metaphysical roots, leaving no ground for moral or existential meaning.
We view the world as it lays itself out, and we explain the manner in which it manifests itself in terms of the axioms of that belief system. We need it to maintain psychological and sociological stability.
“If we let the old gods die, blood would flood the land.”Psychologically, nihilism manifests as despair, depression and disconnection, the loss of purpose. Without a moral or spiritual anchor, as Dostoevsky wrote, “everything is permitted.” Yet Nietzsche saw this crisis as both catastrophe and opportunity: a passage through the abyss, forcing humanity to rebuild new values that affirm life rather than deny it.
You only know where you are by the position of other things.november 2023
I want to build or invent a system that doesn’t know its own position or orientation, a system that lacks any sense of “up” or “down”, left or right, even its own reference frame.
Without up or down, there can be no value hierarchy, no measure of better or worse, progress or collapse. The system still acts, but its actions are directionless: pure energy expenditure.
Five reference frames, none of them agreeing. Every measured angle is a disagreement between two sensors that both believe themselves.
Built by hand, so that it cracks. A machine with fingerprints in it.
It still acts. It arrives nowhere. The reflection refuses to agree with the thing above it.
Without a reference, size is the last thing to go.
A lack of simple purpose.