#existential reflection

Philosophy - Dmitry Kochanovich, 2019 (1st) Oil on canvas, 100x120cm

“Existential”, acrylic on canvas🌙✨

“Love is the answer,” the wall insists, like a palimpsest of exhausted certainties — a phrase so over-circulated it has become almost apotropaic in its repetition.

And yet, standing here, I think of the writers who arrived at the same conclusion only after circling the perimeter of despair — after anatomising cruelty, entropy, and the quiet attrition of human relationships.

There is a difference between the sentimental and the salvific.

Between the facile injunction to “be kind” and the unadorned recognition that tenderness is the last remaining instrument against annihilation.

Sometimes a cliché endures because it is all that survives after the rest of the language has collapsed.

Even William Burroughs saw it, eventually.

In one of his final journal entries, he writes:

“Love? What is it? Most natural painkiller what there is. LOVE.”

(Photo: d.)

Not long agothe twilight called you into her arms;into to the depths of the unknown,left your name in the care of this worldsweetest sound that leapt from your mother’s lipsand ours.The tides where you are is unperturbedby the mortal wind,and in the clouds a garden sprawlsand thrives at the tip of its universe.We can only imagine.If such letter scribbled here shines a light; if our candles…

Artwork 'The apples came first', Mixed Media, 2024

Appel’s Earth: The World I Grew on Canvas

Sometimes, the city hums too loudly, and I imagine it bleeding into the earth, roots tangled with streets, flowers sprouting from rooftops. That’s how Appel’s Earth began—not as a plan, but as a question: what would happen if the ordinary world I walk through every day decided to dream?

The apples came first. Oversized, impossible, glowing golden as if gravity had forgotten them. They became my constant companions, my private muses. Not fruit, exactly—not just symbols—but tiny suns, carrying memory, desire, and the weight of lives lived in corners of the world no one notices. Each canvas became a conversation between city and soil, sky and street, human labor and nature’s quiet rebellion.

I feel that being a nihilist is an evolutionary process, one that isn’t so much fixated on the philosophical definition itself and more on how the philosophy shapes the way we create meaning in our lives. Understanding nihilism, at its simplest, is just acknowledging that life is meaningless. How we choose to move forward does not necessarily make us more or less of a nihilist, but the concept itself can pull us into its darker depths, sometimes keeping us from moving forward at all.

When you become too embedded in a nihilistic lifestyle or perspective, it can start to feel like part of your personality, a maladaptive trait, at best, if we internalize it deeply enough (often thinking it’s for our own betterment). We might grow cynical, convinced we understand the absurdity of the world better than others, and that those who haven’t accepted its meaninglessness will never grasp how simple life could be if they did. Sometimes, we may even start to believe that meaninglessness is the ultimate state of being.

Even those of us who have experienced great adversity can come to believe that this philosophical stance on life is the gateway to zen, a way to live meaningfully without needing to search for meaning at all. Sure, life may improve in some ways, particularly through a greater sense of control over our own choices that a nihilistic mindset can bring, but that’s also where it connects with Buddhist thought, in the way both encourage letting go of fixed meaning.

Part of the reason I got into psychology was to explore how our minds and experiential perspectives shape each other, and how our observations of the world influence the way we thrive and live meaningful lives. We can test our nihilism through resisting our impulses, desires, and expectations of ourselves, but is that truly meaningful? The nihilist would say it doesn’t need to be, nor does it need to contain meaning that endures over time, but I’ve found it to be less complicated than that.

Nihilism is simply the foundation for giving yourself your life back.

It is almost guaranteed that when you begin delving into nihilism, you will confront some of the most painful aspects of yourself, your shadow. This confrontation can lead to an embrace of meaninglessness that borders on self-destruction. That’s why Freud and Jung drew so much inspiration from nihilism when analyzing its impact on the shadow self.

There is an inherent value in being a nihilist, and like Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, you can emerge a better person than you were when you first encountered it. It’s an evolution. When I became a nihilist about a decade ago, in my young adulthood, it had an entirely different meaning than it does now. I lived with the belief that life was meaningless and refused to find a silver lining in anything. It felt comfortable. The word “meaning” itself lost any positive value for me.

With age, maturity, and conquering adversity, you may come to embrace the idea that nothing truly matters in the grand scheme of things, yet what does matter, and what is meaningful, is the life that feels meaningful to you. The small things we often overlook, family, friendships, relationships, are neglected in a fast-paced, capitalistic society leaves little room for introspection.

We can let go of our attachments to things that we once thought we needed but no longer serve us, take the lessons from them, and evolve in a way that doesn’t leave us empty or striving for some ultimate state of zen (which isn’t sustainable if we’re truly in tune with ourselves and our needs). Instead, we become more certain of what we want our lives to look like.