Nihilitarianism

Emotion is what gives life its value, what directs it towards its purpose. Without any threats to our survival, it was no longer enough to live by fear alone, though it had always driven our culture as a form of escape. With the prospect of a long life and later of immortality, our lives was no longer fixed in their course towards death, and we were no longer fixated upon fear of death and the desire to somehow overcome it, to leave something of ourselves behind. Fear became balanced with our other emotions again, just as it had been before we became aware that all of us had to die. Everything was possible now, opening us to all emotions, in all directions. But there was no longer a default emotion: by default there was nothing to feel, and emotion became something we had to create. But emotion isn't something that can be industrialized: it offered no new line of production to replace the old, for an economy to be built upon, though we certainly tried, only to get no farther than entertainment. In the end we were each on our own in our search for meaning, with ourselves and anyone else who realized they shared this fate. A stillness crept over us, until our eyes adjusted to the darkness and we saw the emotions already there in the shadows, from deep within the depths of our mind. They lured us onward into the mystery that we now realized we were. We felt the desire to destroy and create in equal measure, to do anything to upset the flatness and make waves, emotions — and whichever we couldn't do, we would do the other, ever transforming. That instinct was already inside us, just as the seed knows how to sprout shoots and roots, and it only took the silence, the settling of the dust, to find it again. When we knew not how to create, the first thing we did was to destroy — to destroy the ice in which we suddenly saw we were frozen and sink or swim.