It’s been almost 6 years since I made my last blog post. The way I think about the world has changed a lot in the past few years, although my core beliefs in nihilism remain the same.

I wanted to expand on my last blog post, the one titled “Humanity’s wishful belief in karma”. Some commenters have tried arguing that karma does exist by saying something to the effect of ‘just go punch someone and see how that react, if they punch you back that’s karma’. Although I can see their thought process, I feel like a comment truly misses what karma really is and why it doesn’t exist. It is a common misunderstanding so let me explain.

How someone reacts when you punch someone is not karma. If someone punches you back, both in the literal and figurative sense, how they react is a defensive mechanism to prevent you from harming them again. Which is expected, it’s common sense. That’s completely different from karma. What a belief in karma is, a belief in some kind of powerful God, an omnipotent Santa Clause, keeping a list of who is naughty and nice and checking it twice.

You don’t even have to believe in some figurative Santa Clause, maybe you think the universe is somehow keeping track of a karma list, and people with positive karma are rewarded while those with negative karma are charged a karma interest rate. The truth is the universe doesn’t care. Unless if someone explicitly sees you doing a harmful action, and has the power to punish you for that action, no one is keeping track of karma. And even on that individual level the consequence of one’s action is completely unreliable, because not only of the fact that ‘harmful’ is a completely subjective experience depending on the viewer, people are punished with ‘good’ actions and punished for ‘bad’ actions all the time. You may be familiar with the saying “no good deed goes unpunished”. I only say good and bad in quotes because I don’t believe good and evil objectively exists, although there are actions that are conventionally considered ‘good’ and ‘bad’.

The power of reacting to ‘negative’ (or positive) actions such as punching someone is reliant on the fact that

1. The viewer(s) sees the action as a negative (or positive) one and

2. Has the power and will to react (positively or negatively) to the action

So of course if you punch some guy in the face he will react negatively. That’s not karma. Karma is when you do a negative action that either no one knows about or no one who knows about it has the will/power to react, and the universe magically keeps track of this action and punishes you for it later. That doesn’t happen. Karma doesn’t exist.

Posted in Nihilism