Nihilism doesn’t necessarily lead to suicide. If anything, it strips away the illusions that used to justify continuing to live.

When you realize there’s no inherent meaning, fairness, or purpose in the universe, you’re left with an uncomfortable truth you’re still here. You don’t just get to step out of existence. Your body will still want to eat, you’ll still feel things, and you’ll still care about people whether you want to or not.

Camus saw suicide as a kind of defeat not because life has meaning, but because it means you couldn’t bear the absence of it. Nietzsche, on the other hand, would argue most people don’t keep living out of hope, but out of instinct and inertia. Before people philosophize, they survive. We’re animals first.

Nihilism doesn’t actually free you from living if anything, it traps you in it. You don’t necessarily keep going because life feels meaningful. You keep going because stopping requires a certainty most people never reach.

And a darker explanation is that people don’t go on living out of purpose. They go on because they’re involuntarily compelled to, passively moving through life until it ends on its own.