Flema has a song called El Final. In it, the writer treats illusions and expectations like something sterile, almost pointless. “There is no future in life, the present is the end.” It’s a heavy line, loaded, biased even… but I won’t lie, since 2025 started, I’ve been flirting again with an old acquaintance: nihilism. And I’m not entirely sure we’re built, as a species, to sit comfortably with what that idea implies.
There’s nothing new here. Nihilism is as old as thinking itself. Entire libraries exist around it, and honestly, they’re worth diving into if you want to really wrestle with it. But the friction starts when what we feel life should be doesn’t match what reality suggests. Strip it down to biology, for example. What’s the purpose of life? At a basic level, between a cell and you or me, the difference isn’t as grand as we’d like to believe. We reproduce. Cells replicate. Different mechanisms, same outcome. Continuity. That’s it. So where does meaning come from in all that?
And this is where things get uncomfortable. Every ambition, every legacy, every moment of pride or despair across human history, all of it shrinks when you place it next to the scale of nature. Carl Sagan understood that better than most. He had a spacecraft turn its camera back toward Earth from billions of miles away and capture what we now call Pale Blue Dot. That image is almost offensive in its honesty. Everything we’ve ever been, every hero, every villain, every war, every love story, all compressed into a barely visible speck.
We’ve known for centuries that we’re not special in any cosmic sense. Fragile, temporary, and yet deeply attached to ideas of dominance, control, importance. We call ourselves advanced, civilized, the peak of existence. Meanwhile, places like Chernobyl quietly remind us that even our mistakes can outlast us. Radiation will linger long after our arguments about meaning fade out. Nihilism just strips the decoration off all of this. Words like legacy, honor, nation, reputation… they collapse under its lens.
And yet, here’s the twist. It doesn’t have to feel dark. That’s the part people resist. If nothing ultimately lasts, then nothing ultimately traps you either. If I disappear today, my daughter might remember me, maybe her children too. But give it a century, and it’s gone. Not tragically. Just… gone. And in that, there’s a strange kind of quiet. A release. No eternal pressure to matter on a cosmic scale.
Even figures like Genghis Khan, whose genetic footprint still lingers in millions of people, fade into abstraction. A name, a story, a statistic. That’s all. The rest dissolves. Since we first controlled fire, we’ve been trying to impose meaning onto a universe that doesn’t seem particularly interested in giving us one.
That’s why Wanderer above the Sea of Fog hits the way it does. That lone figure standing above the fog, staring into something vast, unknowable… that’s us. Caught between what we want reality to be and what it actually is. And maybe that gap never closes.
Maybe nothing matters in the way we wish it did.
But maybe that’s exactly why anything can matter at all, even if just for a moment.
All photographs and content used in this post are my own. Therefore, they have been used under my permission and are my property.