Nothing Left To Grip
On Letting Go in a World That Doesn't
Nihilism is so meaningful. If you get the humor in that previous sentence, then you’re going to enjoy this post.
I used to think nihilism was a philosophy for morose teenagers (redundant?) in black t-shirts, and something they would outgrow alongside their conviction that Camus was misunderstood (he is) and that the universe owed them some kind of explanation.
I was wrong. Not about the teenagers — they are fine, they will recover — but about nihilism itself. When you actually sit with it, strip it of its posture, nihilism turns out to be something less like despair and more like relief.
Nihilism, at its core, actually says: there is no inherent meaning built into the structure of the universe. The world did not arrive with instructions, and nothing you do or don’t do will alter the indifference of the cosmos. You are not the point. There is, in fact, not a point. If we take that one fact, part of what it brings to us is lowered expectations about the others and ourselves.
Strangely enough, I have heard that same line of thought before in a different room, from different people.
“We admitted we were powerless”
Step One of 12-Step Programs is an act of philosophical demolition. You stop pretending that your will is the hinge on which reality turns. You put down the exhausting project of control because you finally noticed you were never strong enough to carry it in the first place. The drugs won. The obsession won. You, whatever you were before you walked into that room, lost the damn battle.
No amount of willpower, determination, tricks, promises, or prayers can win this battle. Unmanageability takes over. The fight is lost; it offers no meaning, no value, and no victory. Surrender.
And then — here is the part they don’t put on the bumper sticker — something opens.
Every person I know who has done the work describes the same thing: not the terror of the admission, but the strange lightness after it. The room seemed to breathe, and a wonderful question leans into that space: “Okay. So, what do I do now?.”
Powerlessness, done honestly, is not defeat. It is the beginning of contact with what is actually real.
Nihilism, done honestly, gets you to the same doorway. If nothing is inherently meaningful, if meaning is not baked in, not handed down, not waiting for you to discover it on a mountain somewhere, then you are free. Free to construct meaning rather than chase it. Free to bring love to a life that doesn’t require it. Free to stop negotiating with the universe and start inhabiting the one you actually have.
Both paths ask the same first thing: stop gripping.
I understand why people resist powerlessness and meaningless. It sounds like permission to despair. If nothing matters, why get out of bed. If I am powerless, what is the point of trying. But, powerless doesn’t mean helpless.
When you sit with that for a minute, stay in the room a little longer, it becomes clear.
The nihilist who stops at “nothing matters” and goes home to lie in the dark has made an error. He looked at the open door and decided it was a wall. Camus called this the absurd, and his answer was not the dark room. His answer was revolt: the full-bodied, eyes-open, joyful insistence on living anyway. Not denial of the void, but looking into it, laughing.
The person in recovery who hears “you are powerless” and decides that means nothing is worth doing has made the same mistake. The step doesn’t end there. It opens there.
What both are really saying is this: you are not the author of the universe, and you never were, and the sooner you stop trying to be, the sooner you can get on with being a character in it. A unique, amazing, glorious character that shows up. And when we show up, sans expectations and attempts at control…something happens.
Here is where I have trouble with the full nihilist project.
I cannot hold the posture. It isn’t that I lack the philosophical stamina. It’s because the world keeps interrupting my void.
If you have been reading here, you already know this.
Last month I stood at the edge of the water — barefoot, which is the only honest way to stand at the edge of anything — and a wave came in and pulled the sand out from under my feet. Slowly, insistently, without malice. Just the sea doing what the sea does. And I thought: you cannot stay in one place very long. If you try, the ground itself will move.
I don’t know what to call that particular thought — pattern, gift, information — but it is something.
Years ago, hiking alone in the Tetons, a gray jay landed on my backpack and stole a piece of my lunch. I laughed out loud. Me. Sitting beside a mountain lake, laughing at a bird. And what I understood afterward was that something in my stillness had communicated safety. Wild things do not visit the frantic. They find the ones who have gone quiet enough to be found.
Tell me that is without meaning and I will tell you that you were not there.
My mother walked me through Brookgreen Gardens when I was five years old, past azaleas in pink and purple, and stood me before a granite slab and read me a poem in a near-whisper. Those words rested on me like felt, soft and warm. I carried them for fifty years without knowing I was carrying them. The world handed me that. I did nothing to deserve it.
You cannot convince me that is void.
So here is where I land, and I offer it not as dogma, but as practice.
Nihilsim? Yes — let go of the idea that the universe owes you a meaning pre-installed. It doesn’t. That posture has wrecked too many people I love, waiting for permission to live that was never going to arrive. Nihilism does us the service of clearing that out.
Recovery? Yes — admit the powerlessness. Admit that you are not running this show, that the show was running long before you arrived and will run long after you’ve exited, that whatever you are gripping so tightly would keep existing without your grip. Put it down. Step One has been right about this for ninety years.
And then … pay attention.
This world, which does not owe you anything, keeps handing you things anyway. A bird on a backpack. Sand moving under your feet. A mother’s voice beside a granite slab in early April.
The beauty is not proof of meaning. I know that. I get that. It is the world being the world, indifferent and gorgeous and full of gray jays who will absolutely eat your lunch if you go still enough to let them.
Still, I cannot sustain the despair, because there is too much to notice. And noticing — that is the practice that follows the letting go.
Not gripping. Not grasping. Not performing or achieving or earning your place.
Here. Open-handed. Feet in the sand. Watching what comes.
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