This is your life, not a rehearsal. Make the most of it!

At age 22 as a volunteer, I taught a blind teenage boy to swim. I set a metronome on each end of the pool to give him direction. We had fun.

"Where's Brian?" I asked in September. Brian was now navigating the high school with a cane. He only needed tutoring two hours per day. I can't help but think learning to swim increased his confidence.

A Democrat and atheist, I have a strong public service ethic. I was born a high energy optimist.

I got a Master of Public Administration degree because I get the greatest reward from doing work that helps people.

Volunteering as a college mentor since 2006 is highly rewarding. They are the first person in their family to go to college.

Hiking is my passion. I get tremendous joy from the beauty of nature.

So I have always been the opposite of a nihilist. Life is fun!

No…because I enjoy living my life here on this planet with the people I choose to have as friends, and love the beauty of nature with it’s infinite variety of flora, fauna & landscape, and find it and people everywhere pretty fascinating.

I’m a lifelong nonbeliever, but that doesn’t mean I think life has no meaning. My view, formed from my own upbringing in a freethinking family, is that we make our own choice how to conduct our lives within societal parameters, and it’s up to us to give whatever meaning to our lives we decide. I believe this is the only life we get, but far from feeling hopelessness I think that belief makes it more essential that we make it the best possible life we can, and enjoy the fellowship of kin and good friends and do no harm as far as possible to any lifeform or the environment. I think collectively we humans have harmed our environment to such an extent that future sustainability is in the balance, that is certainly something that makes me feel extremely sad, and I do fear for my grandchildren’s generation who will not look kindly on us for our carelessness. Of course the optimist in me hopes that we are not too late to save the planet from destruction and that the sciences being currently applied to halting and ultimately reversing the damage can work.

So all in all, I’d say I’m probably the complete opposite from being a nihilist….

I could I suppose, but what would be the point

I eschew labels.

"In the end..." In the end, the last of the stars will wink out, evaporate away, and the universe will be absolutely cold, empty, and silent. That's how things will be in a few trillion years. But that dead future, in my mind, has little relation to our present reality. Life can be full of meaning; it's up to us individually to make our meaning or discover it. I think helping others, struggling to improve things, makes enough meaning for most sane people.

The term "nihilist" is sometime used as a pejorative by Christians to describe atheists and agnostics (as if believing in an apocryphal sky daddy is the only way to find meaning in life).

To be clear, I do not identify myself as a nihilist.

I would yes. Or at least a "happy nihilist" or "post nihilist" . In so far as I have found that ironically, the abandonment of all belief in meaning, is the best route to meaning.

If you would like enlargement, here goes, I have put this up here before, but I think before your time.

Here for what they are worth, ( Not much.) are my views, which all end in a joke, very like Absurdism which I would perhaps call Appreciateism.
When we realize that there are no big, god given, purposes in life, demanding our obedience. And the many completely contradictory purposes, offered by the many different religions, prove that to be so. Then we can easily see, that wanting any big purpose at all, is merely a vanity and narcissism. The failings which are the weakness that all religions feed off. For if you build up the vanities of people, then they will, obey you, pay you, and praise you, for as long as you keep flattering and confirming those vanities, over and over again.
Yet atheists often say in reply to the theist's question. “What is the purpose of life, if there is no god ?” That, by being none religious, we are free to choose our own purposes. Though admittedly they must by definition be small personal ones, for a transcendent purpose is just another god, meaning that in the deepest sense, atheism, agnosticism and deism are inevitably, by their nature, mainly philosophies of humility.
Yet here for fun is the irony. Suppose for one second, hypothetically, for arguments sake, that there is a creator, an intelligence behind the universe, though one who has not revealed any purpose to us yet, perhaps a deist creator at most. Then what can we discern, if anything, is most likely to be pleasing to it, if pleasing it has any value at all ? Well after the usual if doubtful, givens, such as, be kind, the only thing I think that seems likely, is that we should appreciate its creation as much as possible, down to the smallest detail. Valuing and treasuring all that we are given. And what are we doing when we create our own small purposes, whether, we climb mountains, garden, paint pictures, entertain our pets, make a coffee for a friend or help in a charity shop, if not appreciating that creation, or nature, down to the smallest detail, and valuing it enough to care for it ? Practical environmentalism. Perhaps therefore being an atheist could after all, be the most pleasing of all things to the hypothetical creator.

Now forget the hypothetical creator, since it has now done its job, and what are you left with ? That the small things are the biggest things there are, because they demand the greatest appreciation of you, and it is when you turn your back on the idea of great purpose that you come nearest to your greatest purpose. And when you forget god that you are most likely to please god. So you see that in the end, my deepest thoughts lead to an ironic joke. Nice joke perhaps ? Yes, but I was also never more serious.
And is this my original philosophy ? No, I don't think so, for at the very least the Greek philosopher Epicurus more than twenty centuries ago wrote. “Bring me a pot of cheese and I will feast.” And. “Don't over think it.” While Albert Camus invented Absurdism, in the last century, which as far as I can see, is in all main points little different from Epicurus, perhaps philosophy has just gone full circle.

Taken to extremes nihilism might mean you wanted to destroy things, or conventional things. I see the meaning that life has no purpose but it is up to us to give our lives a purpose.

Meaningless, maybe. We are here and then we are not. But in the meantime we can have a lot of fun.

i might be just a little bit too pessimistic to qualify as a nihilist.

I do not use labels to identify anybody, much less me.

No!

Only a religious jackass would assume that the lack of a god would make life meaningless...

Probably only the Nihilists!

To self identify as a nihilist is to confute the philosophy.

It is merely one philosophical perspective and the product of excessive thinking about life. Life is a dynamic process.

Albert Camus said that there is only one serious philosophical question, suicide. However, despite the apparent absurdities of life as he put it; he chose life until his tragic death in a car accident in the 4th January 1960.

I think that being agnostic or atheistic makes our one life and those around us more precious and meaningful.

Nihilist has an extreme skepticism maintaining that nothing in the world has a real existence.

I was wonder if nihilist exist. A life with no purpose or ethics is very hard to imagine for me. Sure religion and politics are like mosquitoes. I redesign my life where they don't bug me so much, unlike most people.

No. If for no other reason than that I think morality is very important, esp. since we only go around once in life on this rock, so living morally is extremely important.

That's a tough one. I am a major skeptic, and considering that no-matter how much success or notoriety we have during our brief stay on the planet, we don't get a second chance, I can understand why nothing has meaning, but, at the same time, just as we cannot prove the existence of "god" neither can we disprove it. Having said that, objectively, I can see no point to any of this, but I don't think I could be described as a Nihilist.

I don’t subscribe to nihilism. I can see their point, but as with post-Nietzschean post-structuralism it gets way overdone. Life is ridiculous or absurd, but one can seek to construct meanings from the multiple shards or fragments given. Why not?

The pomos have a point about overarching grand narratives, but theirs becomes one too, as Critical Theorist Jurgen Habermas aptly pointed out as performative contradiction. Other Critical Theorists have gone beyond Habermas, such as Seyla Benhabib and Douglas Kellner. Given Kellner strives to find meanings in pop culture texts such as movies, I fail to see the nihilism. The original Critical Theorists were pessimists for sure, but not Habermas and later generation thinkers. Pessimism and nihilism are differently oriented.

While Taoism ultimately leads us to conclude that there is no divine order, or abso truth (that is knowable), it does not conclude that any behavior is acceptable. There are rules but breaking them does not lead to an ultimate judgment about you so the rules are merely agreements. This is why it's preferable to live in communities of people who agree to basic tenets of that community. Diversity may be great for many reasons but community cohesion is not proving to be one of them.

Without reading all the comments posted so far in case there's a duplication, of course the doctrine is legally flawed because of belief in nothing is still a belief. In answer to the first question no I wouldn't identify as a nihilist because I have morals.

Nothing plus nothing is nothing unless you use this Text box to state nothing is actually something when you explain nothing to anyone else!!!