I wish author got out of their self-referentiality a bit before going deep with their presuppositions into a book. > “Nihilizing” is a thing we all do at times

I wish author got out of their self-referentiality a bit before going deep with their presuppositions into a book. > “Nihilizing” is a thing we all do at times: refusing to recognize meanings that are right in front of us. If there is a refusal of recognition, it implies a pre-processing stage of estimating a lack of payoff for the cognitive work in that area, which itself is requires a meaning system we made that evaluation from! This is not nihilizing, it is merely not committing cognitive suicide by trying to make sense of everything indiscriminately with a limited information processing capacity. By their definition, only a "god" would not be nihilizing. > Committing to nihilism, deciding that you “are a nihilist,” is unusual, and typically a big deal. It’s a conversion experience, and the adopted identity may persist for years. It’s uncanny that you can go that long without noticing that there isn’t an –ism. That’s a feature of the peculiar cognitive distortions nihilism produces as a stance. Author asserts "true nihilism" is merely an existential state, and not a system. True nihilism is not a useful category though; dead matter would be the most "true nihilists" while a breathing human would always have a pre-supposition of meaning as they continued to breathe, since they are meaning making agents strongly embedded to their bodies and within their environment. This is not a very useful way of diving things up. The pragmatic existence of nihilism is not a pure empty state; it is not even throwing noise to our meaning making machines, it is throwing "anti-meaning" patterns that take the deconstructing and dismantling to an extreme without any goal to put things back better. Certain post-modern thought can both perform and propagate nihilism in this way pretty well; an assertion of non-existence of any meta-narrative that joins all narratives while scrambling all the puzzle pieces you've tried to piece together and then throwing them into an acid vat as a proof is an -ism. Peculiarly, author is also a nihilist in the -ism sense; in addition to this article, their "No cosmic plan" article is subtitled "Great confusions about meaningness stem from the mistaken assumption that there must be some sort of eternal ordering principle.", or "Nihilism: denying meaning" with "Nihilism is the wrong idea that nothing is meaningful, based on the accurate realization that there is no external, eternal source of meaning." Those are serious (and in my opinion misleadingly incomplete) assumptions on first principles that also happens to be the WIP chapters of their book.