IS YOUR AMBITION MAKING YOU UNHAPPY AND ILL?

Mindful nihilism is all about seeing yourself as an insignificant cog in the universe’s big picture — and it works.

DO you ever lie awake at night agonising about being utterly forgotten once you’ve shuffled off this mortal coil? Do you even matter? Do you feel so pressured to leave behind some semblance of a legacy that it’s making you miserable? Ever feel like your burning ambition is draining or making you ill?

These were all questions plaguing Wendy Syfret, 31, who worked in the media and couldn’t stop obsessing over what her life meant. Then she had an anxiety attack and decided to change the way she approached things.

Nihilism, the belief that life is meaningless, is not something we typically associate with millennials who have grown up in age of the side hustle, the “be the change you want to see” #inspo and toxic #girlboss culture. But for Syfret, the idea that life could have no point gave her the perspective she needed to become happy.

She spent the next two years researching the philosophy of not caring and has just published a book with her findings, The Sunny Nihilist. It’s all about “mindful nihilism”, which is essentially a mindset that gives you the space to enjoy the simple moments in life available to you, like noticing a crisp autumn morning, rather than torturing yourself with thoughts of the dreams and goals you think you ought to be chasing.

“I was an example of all the things I say are destructive in the book,” she says. “I felt like I was going to pass out in the street as I felt so annihilated by this sense of what am I even doing? What is the point? Am I reaching my goals? And suddenly I had this moment of clarity out of nowhere: one day you’re going to be dead and no one is going to give a shit about any of this.”

Taking a wider perspective and looking at the bigger picture, say, by considering your job, income or relationship in the context of the universe, can be deeply “freeing”, she argues. “It makes you feel very small and, yes, that can be existentially terrifying but it also makes your problems feel very small.”

Society, Syfret believes, has commodified “meaningfulness” so much that our quest to live purposeful lives — think journalling daily about what we have achieved one day and manifesting each morning about what we want to achieve the next — is only leaving us all stressed out, unfulfilled and unhappy.

Once you see that it is everywhere, you can’t unsee it. For example, “you’re listening to a podcast advert and they’re talking about family and value and it turns out to be for mortgage insurance.

You’re at the pharmacy and a make-up brand tells you this mascara is a unique expression of your singular female power. In theory it seems like it’s rewarding but when everything is such a thing it makes everything exhausting”.

The consequence of having your sense of value “artificially inflated” in this way can be particularly toxic in today’s workplace, she warns: “A lot of those values traditionally offered to our parents, like having a secure job, being able to buy a house, have eroded for people like us (millennials).”

She continues: “If an employer wants you to work a 50-hour week without the financial security that people in a pre-global financial crisis world would enjoy, that’s when this idea of meaning comes along. If you can’t quantify your time in an understandably valuable way, people start looking for this opaque sense of meaning in their work, otherwise you’re just confronted with the fact that you’re doing all of this and not really getting anything out of it.” This can muddy the water and skew the way you weigh up if in fact you’re actually satisfied with your job or whether you’re being fairly rewarded with what you’re owed.

Now Syfret, in a “much less stressful job in media”, believes sunny nihilist in her is the key to her happiness. To those who find themselves lying awake at night agonising over their legacy, Syfret has sobering words: “No one will rememberyou. No one will remember this day. The world will keep spinning.” And that is a reason to be cheerful.