One of the many disadvantages of nihilism is that prayer doesn't really work. If you're a frequent reader, you may know that I found nihilism only semi-recently. Before that I didn't know what I was, but I had a Christian upbringing. Although, I was never really able to believe in anything, causing me to always be at odds with Christianity. And although finding nihilism is the best thing that ever happened to me, I often say that I don't recommend nihilism to anyone who is able to believe. Belief has many benefits, one of which is the ingenious practice of prayer.
During our lives we experience many situations where we can foresee future events that are at least partially out of our control and will have profound impacts on us. This can cause negative emotions such as anxiety and overall be extremely unpleasant. It's an evolutionary mechanism to ensure that we "do our best". Our body's low level functions tell the cognitive part of our brain to "do something for fuck's sake!" This restlessness, this unsatiable urge to perform any action that may impact the outcome of the important future event for our benefit, is brilliantly addressed by praying. If you believe that your fate does not depend on chance but is controlled by a deity that listens to your prayers, you can convince those low level functions of your body that praying is the best call of action, calming it down to fully focus on the prayer.
Now, you might say that there are future events where you're probably better off doing something actually productive, rather than wasting your time praying. For example, if you have an important exam coming up, you'll probably be better off learning than praying an entire rosary. But even in this example, you'll probably not be learning 24/7 for two weeks before the exam. If you did that, you'd probably not do very well. No matter what important event is coming up, you're probably better off if you're getting enough rest. Falling asleep praying is very much preferable to laying awake all night worrying.
If you understand my concept of nihilism, it's pretty straight forward to see why the concept of prayer is incompatible to it. If you don't believe in a cause and effect relationship between your prayers and your fate, the activity becomes ultimately pointless. A core concept of my form of nihilism is brutal honesty and lying to yourself to portray prayer as a productive activity for influencing your fate violates this.
If you are an attentive reader, you may have spotted a contradiction there. And if you did, you already found the fix for the problem. First I explained why prayer is helpful for the outcome of future challenges, then I denounced telling yourself that as lying to yourself. Actually, what I call a lie is the supernatural explanation for why praying will influence our fate. If you simply believe in the merits of calming yourself down, you can achieve the same effect but in a more honest way and with much more realistic expectations of what it can and cannot do.
So, what remains of prayer if you take away the mystical part? Meditation. Being able to meditate is one of the best skills you can learn. Annoyingly, people tend to mix up meditation with spirituality. There's very little material out there that explains meditation without also trying to paddle some bullshit belief. In addition, there's very little scientific foundation to it because it is frustratingly under-researched. But I'm telling you that it is not a matter of belief because even a nihilist like me can become good at it.
Your psyche is entangled with your body in ways that science does not fully understand and no scientist will claim otherwise. You can be as scientifically minded as you want, you have to accept that there are things in the world that science does not understand yet. It's a common mistake I see in those "scientifically minded" people that they don't believe in any of those things. But another thing that science does not fully understand is the complex interplay of compounds that are created when sugar caramelizes. Does that mean you shouldn't eat caramel, although it is awesome? There is a whole smorgasbord of capabilities your brain has that you are not using if you only believe in the current state of science and nothing else.
Unfortunately, the difficult part when learning meditation is to look past all the spiritual bullshit. Maybe I should write a guide to meditation at some point. I'm not sure I'd be good at it but I might just give it a shot. There's an idea for a future blog post.
