A very sad case of a young intellectual nihilist who committed suicide. He left behind a 1,905 page suicide note that seems more like a dissertation than a note (replete with 1,433 footnotes and an expansive bibliography). I am so thankful that my many students who are atheists, nihilists, or who are so attracted to Nietzsche do not travel down the road quite so far as this young man.
Story here. Some excerpts:
“Every word, every thought, and every emotion come back to one core problem: life is meaningless,’’ he wrote. “The experiment in nihilism is to seek out and expose every illusion and every myth, wherever it may lead, no matter what, even if it kills us.’’
“The death of my father marked the beginning, or perhaps the acceleration, of a kind of moral collapse, because the total materialization of the world from matter to humans to literal subjective experience went hand in hand with a nihilistic inability to believe in the worth of any goal,’’ he wrote.
“If life is truly meaningless and there is no rational basis for choosing among fundamental alternatives, then all choices are equal and there is no fundamental ground for choosing life over death,’’ he concluded.
