Become More And More Untiion You Become Nothing
What strikes most in the excerpt form "The Diary Of a Woman Sentenced To Death" is that your description is actually full of values despite claiming their absence. She speaks about truth rather than illusion. Further, she speaks about waking up rather than remaining asleep. She also speaks about understanding mechanisms rather than participating in comforting narratives. Those are values.
The moment you prefer truth over illusion, one value has already survived the collapse. When you prefer understanding over self-deception, another value has survived.
This is why the deepest question is not whether life amounts to nothing. The deepest question is what remains after the inflation disappears. Suppose you completely abandon the fantasy that success defeats death. You abandon the fantasy that wealth defeats death. You also stop thinking about the fantasy that fame defeats death. These are the values that society has forced upon you and they can actually do more harm than good in life. They are also lies because nothing defeats death.
You have this realization, you of course don't die and now what remains after the realization? For Eckhart Tolle, the answer is "the now." For buddhists, the answer is "awakening." For Nietzsche, the answer was "creation." For Schopenhauer, it was resignation from striving. For you, I suspect the answer may be something different. But the woman's attitude the one of someone who has found absolute nothingness but rather of someone whose interest survived the collapse of several illusions.
Ironically what relaxed her was not the realization that life amounts to nothing, but the opposite, that many of the demands imposed upon life amount to nothing. Those are very different conclusions. And of course life with such societal demsnds may amounts to nothing. The first realization says that existence itself is empty. The second says that much of what society, culture, ego, and ambition demand from existence is unnecessary.
That is why her experience felt relaxing. Not because she became convinced that everything is meaningless, but because for a moment the constant command to become more, acquire more, achieve more, and justify your existence became silent. A condemned prisoner is relieved when the struggle ends. But a person who realizes that many struggles were optional from the beginning may experience a different kind of relief. Not the relief of death, but the relief of no longer carrying burdens of life that were never truly required.
