Hi, welcome to the Forum. Your post is quite poignant, really. I obviously don’t know anything about your circumstances beyond what you’ve written here, but will venture that what you experience as ‘nihilism’ is due to a lack or absence in the culture in which we nowadays live. Without saying what kind of purposes one ought to consider, or whether there really even is one, the fact that individuals are obliged to wrestle with the question in the way that you clearly are, indicates a gap or shortcoming in the cultural narrative in which you’ve been raised.

And I think your proposed solution to it is consistent with that. The kind of thought-experiments you’re considering are quite consistent with the views of those in an educated, technocratic culture.

But I think what you’re actually trying to reach for, or what you sense as a possibility, is a genuinely transcendent or spiritual dimension to existence - which, however, I don’t think your intellectual view will allow you to consider.

I don’t quite know what to suggest, but something I was reading last night comes to mind. You might have heard of John Stuart Mill. In Britain, in the 19th and early 20th century, Mill was indeed regarded as a very important pulblic intellectual and political theorist. His On Liberty is a still a classic of modern liberal theory. But the point about Mill was that, as a young child, he was subjected to an intensive educational programme by his father. He was able to read Greek at a young age, and by primary school age had read all of Plato’s Dialogues. He mastered the classical curriculum whilst still a teen.

And then he had a nervous breakdown. This is understandable, given the intensity of his up-bringing and the way he had been force-fed information. For several years, he was in a state of depression. And what brought him out of it was reading the poetry of Wordsworth, who was the first of the Romantic poets. At that point, he suddenly realised the importance of aesthetics, and also of the ability to find beauty in nature. Anyway, as is well known, he succeeded in becoming a mature and integrated person and had a long and fruitful career.

Anyway, my feeling is, that you’re in need of something similar to what the young Mill experienced, with Wordsworth. I’m not actually suggesting romantic verse, as we’re in a dramatically different cultural context now, and it seems very olde worlde. But something with an aesthetic and, if you like, spiritual dimension. Because such things do exist. There are, as the well-known line from Shakespeare says, more things in heaven and earth than our philosophy has dreamed of. And that is especially so now, where philosophy has been to all intents elbowed aside by a technocracy that, despite it’s dazzling technical prowess, is totally lacking a sense of the transcendent.

Human beings are more than the products of physical evolution. But because of the esteem in which evolutionary biology is held, we loose sight of that. Current culture sees us as another species, but we’re much more than that; we’re beings, and beings who are able to know and understand many things, for which there doesn’t seem any obvious biological rationale. But again, because of the shallowness of modern culture, we’re kind of ‘marooned in the present’ - we seem to have landed here almost by chance, in a world that has no intrinsic meaning, and are obliged to make our own, to spin them out of our own selves with no real cultural narrative of meaning against which to do so.

There are many ways to navigate that maze of meaningless. I won’t suggest any in particular, beyond assuring you that there are some.