I was a devout nihilist until I became a father. Now I'm on the fence. Lol

@KevinLentini Ironically, fatherhood had the opposite effect on me. Give them a chance to grow up and act out or take you for granted. You're likely still in the phase of imagining your future self the patriarch of a grateful family, gathered 'round to hear your wisdom and, at the end, to reminisce all misty-eyed at your deathbed. While this is possible, it's not common, especially here in the 21st century. Also one of my children died at the age of 30, and that tends to form one's thinking a bit more fatalistically.

None of which is to say I consider my role as father to be a total waste or pointless. The way in which nihilism is most often misunderstood is that it must inherently involve hopeless despair when that's not at all the point of Nietzsche's thinking on the topic. He did not teach that there is no meaning or purpose, only that it is completely self-determined rather than externally bestowed. He saw nihilism as a robust, positive ideology that was liberating from illusions of inherent meaning and notions of entitlement that go with it.