Nothing is really meaningful
“Nothing really means anything.” That is the essence of Nihilism Lite . You’ve heard it a million times. You’ve probably had the thought yourself sometimes, even if you’ve never considered yourself a nihilist.
Lite nihilism divides meanings into “real” ones, which could do the job if they existed, and other ones, which are inadequate.
Nihilism just follows the lead of common eternalist systems here. They want to trick you into putting all your energy into their system. To do that, they make a two-pronged assault on your ability to perceive meaning accurately. They claim that their special meanings are supremely valuable; and that other meanings have zero value, or hardly any, so they aren’t “really” meaningful at all. They say their special meanings are absolute, ultimate, objective, transcendent: abstract metaphysical properties which somehow confer infinite value. The meanings you would otherwise naturally perceive are defective: they are made-up, illusory, trivial, or mundane, and therefore have or little or no value.1
Nihilism Lite is the stance that there aren’t any of the real type of meanings—although it grudgingly admits that the other type seems to exist. Full-strength nihilism says that the defective so-called meanings aren’t meaningful at all.
