It took me a long time to realize how intimately atheism and nihilism are connected. It seems obvious to me in hindsight now, as maybe it does to you. If it’s not obvious to you, maybe sharing my journey will be interesting or informative. If it is obvious to you, and you struggle with it, then hopefully it’ll be helpful.. here goes.

I don’t remember being depressed when I was younger. Maybe that’s an unnatural thing for a child to be? I don’t know. I do know that I was raised in a religious house, that I never really questioned the existence of a God or had to wonder what the meaning of it all was.

At some point I started to realize that organized religion and structured belief systems weren’t really for me. I was probably late in high school or earlier in college. Religion started to feel increasingly restrictive, which didn’t seem necessary to me to believe in a God or follow his tenets. Things devolved quickly from that realization.

I always knew I was going into a scientific field. I didn’t know which or what I wanted to do with my life, but I resonated with and enjoyed that type of thinking. I’m not about to say that science and religion can’t coexist coherently. I know religious scientists who are undeniably intelligent. I just don’t trust their judgement. The further I got into science, the less I was okay with a God. I started thinking of myself as agnostic, because how could we ever know if there was or wasn’t a God? I didn’t want to believe a thing, I wanted to know it. That’s why I was attracted to scientific thinking in the first place.

By the time I was probably in my third year at college, I was an antitheist. I had spent some time thinking about it, and decided I wasn’t comfortable with the idea that there might be some Being which could arbitrarily decide that today 2+2=5, but only for him. To me, that’s the definition of a miracle, and I didn’t like it. I knew this was a step away from scientific thought, because it wasn’t founded in reason but in my intuition. I kept calling myself agnostic (where my mother couldn’t hear), but I could feel myself moving away from that too.

The jump from agnostic to anti-theist happened suddenly, and emotionally. I fully knew and still today recognize it was a choice to believe something, just something opposite what I had previously believed. I accepted that because it seemed better than the alternative. I was at a religious funeral for my partner’s uncle. I had met the man once, while he was ill, and he’d spoken only a single sentence to me. I had said nothing to him, but have the color of his eyes as I met them burned into my memory forever. He said, “I wish we could have gotten to know each other”. He seemed sincere, and made me very genuinely wish the same.

It wasn’t really his loss that drove me to rejecting God. It wasn’t something like pediatric cancer. It wasn’t witnessing greed tear down a society I lived in and maybe the planet and everything on it. It was the inability of this man’s friends, coworkers and even some of his family to really appreciate the depth of the loss of him, because they’d “see him again”. I heard that phrase at least once every two minutes for an hour, but saw little to no tears. Meanwhile I couldn’t get his vividly blue eyes out of my head. I rejected God for the love of someone I didn’t know. If there is a God out there, and he judges me harshly for that, he’s no God I want to follow.

It’s been years since that moment, when the world broke and was remade for me in a brief second of fury and sadness. I immersed myself in working toward my degree while trying to pay my rent. Then in finding a job and planning my wedding. Next came kids, and finally I had to think about it again. I had to tell my mom that bible stories were just stories in our house. I started contemplating what my husband and I would teach our kids. I started contemplating existence and meaning in life. Slowly, at first, I started to become depressed.

My first attempt to discuss anything existential with my husband went disastrously. Turns out he’d struggled with some of these things earlier in life, as a long time atheist, and didn’t like where he landed. He’d decided to put it out of his mind, and didn’t appreciate my dragging it to the front again. I didn’t yet fully understand why. It didn’t take too long for me to figure out though.

Turns out, there’s no meaning to life. There’s no meaning to anything, objectively speaking. Everything all of us alive today have ever known will one day be gone. Everyone who even remembers it will be gone. It’ll be like it never happened, no matter how it happens or how it ends. That’s a hard thing to accept, particularly having recently brought children into this mess.

I got stuck there for a bit, and think my husband might still be. It’s a dark place. I read a great book, called ‘Why fish don’t exist’, which I highly recommend. It scared me how much of it I understood and connected with. I think I’m on my way out of that place now, maybe, hopefully. I’d like to help others stuck in that place too, if I can. If I’m honest, I’d like to continue to help myself.

There’s no objective meaning to life. We’re not here for a reason and the universe doesn’t care about us. That’s the objective truth, and that’s where reason leaves us. But just like I chose to abandon God despite reason, I can choose happiness. We might not any of us matter objectively, but we all matter a whole hell of a lot subjectively.

We all exist here together, sharing this space and time with one another and with the leaves on the trees and the stars in the sky. We are what we have, all that we have, a great network of all of existence. We matter to each other. We’re part of something larger than ourselves, and there is good in it. Any amount of good is worth holding on to, desperately. Any amount of good we can create for one another is worth infinitely more than the effort we put out to make it.

In a way I feel I’ve returned to religion. I partly think maybe people even need religion. There’s a huge difference this time though. This time I choose to intelligently engage, on my own terms, a religion not of gods but of Humanity and Existence. Now when I feel the darkness closing in and my heart rate increase as I fight down anxiety, I have something to tell myself which seems to help.

“I’m part of something big and there is good in it.”

“I am the trees and the trees are me.”

“I am the stars and the stars are me.”

“I am the smile on my kids face.”

“I am every person I’ve ever made laugh.”

“I’m part of something big and there is good in it. I can make something good in it. That matters.”

Just in case it helps someone, anyone, even one single person… I love you.

And if God is reading this, fight me. I’m my own god now.