Fighting Nihilism

Albert Camus argued for creative acts as the way to fight nihilism. Nihilism is:

a viewpoint that traditional values and beliefs are unfounded and that existence is senseless and useless.

 I think mixed in my depression was a strong streak of nihilism.

I find an example of this fight against nihilism in Ocean Vuong: ‘I was addicted to everything you could crush into a white powder’.

As a teenager in bleak post-industrial Connecticut, Vuong saw many of his friends die – “little dots erased off the map” – as a result of the opioid epidemic. “We didn’t call it an epidemic,” he says of the early 2000s, when even his teachers were dying of drugs, without being given a funeral. “It’s so shameful,” he describes people thinking at the time, “A teacher being a junkie?” As his family’s great hope, Vuong was determined not to suffer the same fate. “I refuse to die,” he writes of his younger self in On Earth.

 Narrative published one of this writer's poems here.

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