It is a failure in continuation from the ground of being to a view on the totality of the existence.
No one has a problem finding meaning in the minutiae of their here and now; they avoid pain, they feed themselves, they breathe. They conform to the meaning of the signals (mostly pain) that demand we do these things. At this level, everything is meaningful.
Then we scale up temporally (longer spans of times) and spatially (wider spans of space); we can think about tomorrow, we find it meaningful to go to grocery store and get our favorite ice cream etc.
A couple of scale ups later sometimes, something wrong happens and we can find ourselves in the ultimate scale; totality of universe; (assumed) "creation" and "death" of the universe. Even only from a computation perspective; we don't fully 'understand' this scale, our intelligibility is limited in comparison to the 'objects' at hand (hyperobjects if you will); we're using symbolic processing to make sense of it but we can't frame the ultimate frame, we can't compress this information very accurately (yet).
At that point some folks show up with their propositions that are harder to refute because everything is hard to compute to begin with. They shine light to certain possibilities (light bringer pun is intended), they conflate current state of not knowing with unknowability, or worse non-existence. They conflate our intelligence with intelligibility of the universe. They go "there is no single organizing principle, because that sounds a lot like god" and can't explain how multiple organizing principles can share the same space if they are not bound by a common one. They claim pure stochasticity and ignore the physical reality we have been conforming to through evolution; or principled approximation to its first principles; that we can compress reality into formulas, while noise really wouldn't compress. They have no good idea on how to relate to the existence of existence. Nihilism is the result of such cognitive distortions at this level.
The problem is not actually about being at the top of the scale, it is to omit the continuity from our daily scale to it; it is skipping the intermediary steps that mislead us. That's why they can conceptualize complete stochasticity at top while perform perfect faith in meaningfulness of gravity. In neoplatonic tradition this is countered with practicing the anagogic ascent, in stoic traditions with the view from above practices.
In modern times however we only have DIY spirituality without proper grounding in what have been tried before. Throw some McMindfulness, read a translation of Nietzche, performatively worship the god of market normativity and you're already confused enough. Blog belongs to a person who has "founded, managed, grown, and sold a successful biotech informatics company.", this is their hobby (as they admit) and bunch of people talk about it. This is how new nihilists are made.
No one has a problem finding meaning in the minutiae of their here and now; they avoid pain, they feed themselves, they breathe. They conform to the meaning of the signals (mostly pain) that demand we do these things. At this level, everything is meaningful.
Then we scale up temporally (longer spans of times) and spatially (wider spans of space); we can think about tomorrow, we find it meaningful to go to grocery store and get our favorite ice cream etc.
A couple of scale ups later sometimes, something wrong happens and we can find ourselves in the ultimate scale; totality of universe; (assumed) "creation" and "death" of the universe. Even only from a computation perspective; we don't fully 'understand' this scale, our intelligibility is limited in comparison to the 'objects' at hand (hyperobjects if you will); we're using symbolic processing to make sense of it but we can't frame the ultimate frame, we can't compress this information very accurately (yet).
At that point some folks show up with their propositions that are harder to refute because everything is hard to compute to begin with. They shine light to certain possibilities (light bringer pun is intended), they conflate current state of not knowing with unknowability, or worse non-existence. They conflate our intelligence with intelligibility of the universe. They go "there is no single organizing principle, because that sounds a lot like god" and can't explain how multiple organizing principles can share the same space if they are not bound by a common one. They claim pure stochasticity and ignore the physical reality we have been conforming to through evolution; or principled approximation to its first principles; that we can compress reality into formulas, while noise really wouldn't compress. They have no good idea on how to relate to the existence of existence. Nihilism is the result of such cognitive distortions at this level.
The problem is not actually about being at the top of the scale, it is to omit the continuity from our daily scale to it; it is skipping the intermediary steps that mislead us. That's why they can conceptualize complete stochasticity at top while perform perfect faith in meaningfulness of gravity. In neoplatonic tradition this is countered with practicing the anagogic ascent, in stoic traditions with the view from above practices.
In modern times however we only have DIY spirituality without proper grounding in what have been tried before. Throw some McMindfulness, read a translation of Nietzche, performatively worship the god of market normativity and you're already confused enough. Blog belongs to a person who has "founded, managed, grown, and sold a successful biotech informatics company.", this is their hobby (as they admit) and bunch of people talk about it. This is how new nihilists are made.