AFTER NIHILISM: Is Meaning Still Possible?

The default mood of today is pessimism—and at its root, nihilism.

Where we once replied with childlike affirmation to the question of “the meaning of life,” now one replies with adult suspicion, resignation, or irony. Is there any path forward left for meaning, or are we doomed to become nihilists for eternity?

After Nihilism is Euwyn Goh’s debut work, written out of a personal spiritual crisis and told plainly, in the first person. It traces nihilism to its source and presses past it, on the wager that nihilism is not the end of the search for meaning but its beginning. The book moves in three parts: an overture of journals that sets the mood, a descent into crisis, and an ascent back out. Euwyn is a Malaysian-born, Australian-educated preacher’s kid turned writer and technologist.

“We are told a crisis of meaning blights modernity, a crisis leading to an insurmountable alienation and a despair that stubbornly lingers in the modern psyche. We are all nihilists in one way or another. The rationalist resolutely evangelises science and reason as our salvation, while the conservative has a nostalgia for a past that never existed. The New Ager hopes to find salvation by the euphoric prolapse of the inner, while the technooptimist follows suit vicariously through the machine. Conversely, Euwyn’s metaphysical contention is that reality is non-determined. Ergo, nihilism is far from the end but the beginning. The antidote, as it were, for the nihilist is to recognise they have not gone far enough.”
— Rahul Sam, philosophy podcaster