Friedrich Nietzsche

For Nietzsche, life didn’t have an automatic inherited meaning, or an “universal truth” but rather, he believed, it
was up to you to work and find a meaning of life. To find a meaning that aligned with your own reason and
aspirations.

And just because someone else had a different meaning from you, that didn’t mean that their meaning or your
meaning was invalid or less just because it was different. He accepted that all human minds had different ways to
cope with the world.

However, in his writings, he did write about things he considered nihilist or only brought misery to those that
believed it.

God is dead.

Arthur Schopenhauer

‘LIFE WITHOUT PAIN HAS NO MEANING’

We have to be responsible for our own existence. However, unless we do “become ourselves” life is meaningless.
All life is suffering. Suffering is caused by desire, and we can alleviate suffering. We are all caught up in a hopeless
cycle of wanting things, getting them, and then wanting more things. It doesn’t stop until we die. Whenever we
seem to get what we want, we start wanting something else. We’re never satisfied, never stop craving for more than
we have.

Martin Heidegger

According to Heidegger, the human being must understand that he or she is a "being toward death" ( Being and
Time ). "As soon as man comes to life," he says, "he is at once old enough to die". Therefore the awareness
and acceptance of death is a requirement for authentic (genuine) existence. Death is non-transferable. He believed
that death is not accidental, nor should be analyzed.

Jean-Paul Sartre

Sartre’s philosophy is considered to be a representative of (atheistic extentialism). For Sartre, the human person
desires to be God; the desires to exist as a being that has its sufficient ground in itself. This means that for an
atheist, since God does not exist, the human person must face the consequences of this. The human person is
entirely responsible for his/her own existence.

Sartre is famous with his dualism

En-soi (in-itself) is the self-sufficient, lumpy, contingent being of ordinary things. Being-in-itself is concrete, lacks
the ability to change, and is unaware of itself.

Pour-soi (for-itself) is the mode of existence of consciousness. Being-for-itself is conscious of its own
consciousness but is also incomplete.