Dear,

I know there’s been tremendous pain in your life, and i can only imagine how it weighs on you. My experience would tell me you’re filled with a hopelessness and a numbness brought by uncontrolled circumstances. Perhaps you aren’t numb and you feel the weight of reality pressing down on you constantly and so you pursue any manner of feeling that may divert the barrage of hatred, sadness, and other bad things. While I can’t say which is the more natural course to turn to, I am certain that the hedonistic approach is one of purely present fulfillment, and the course of someone who’s given up completely. While the nihilistic may lead to a darker state of mind, I believe it does allow for a potential escape from all these troubles in the future. The nihilism I am talking about is what I would call present nihilism, a form of nihilism that states the only significance an experience has is how it is held in regard to its witness in the future.  To give an example, if a painting was to be viewed by an individual whom, upon initial review thought it an ugly painting though later changed their mind and believed it to be a beautiful one, the only significant opinion towards that painting is the most recent, that being that it is beautiful. However, from the perspective of the past witness (that being the one whom said it was ugly) he would have to contend with the fact that his opinion is meaningless, and therefore the nihilism is created. While this seems good for the most recent version of the witness, if the recent, or present, witness is aware of this phenomenon, he can only expect his own current opinion that the painting is beautiful to one day be taken over by a new one, and thus we can see that our present perspective is repeatedly overwritten by our new selves. By living with this view, we can bear the weight of the present in sacrifice for our future selves, and while living from a futures perspective may create absurdity in our present conditions and joys, we can live in hope that our futures will be bright enough that the questions of the absurd are absent. Our current condition of discontentment and self sacrifice for our future selves is one forced on by a suffering we’ve been granted. I’m sure, however, if you try hard enough and keep hope, that condition will be fleeting, and you’ll enter into a life blanketed in a warmth of hope with an untroubled mind; one where things like nihilism and hedonism and bad things are all forgotten. 

In sacrifice,

Taylor Wilson