Note: The first four paragraphs represent a worldview.

To know is misery.

To live awakened and sobered is to realize that the world lacks sense, meaning, fundamental goodness, or undeceived joy.

The great scholars, the highly educated, even the unexplainably wise writers, were often resentful of existence or even nihilistic. On another side of the same coin, resent and annoyance has become an aesthetic for groups of people who choose not be defined by worldly constructs, predetermined social cliques, or societal expectations: the alternative.

To raise a middle finger to the world, to rationalize away happiness, to suggest a miserable-yet-enlightened existence, is a sign of advanced awareness, of the protective hand being pushed voluntarily away from our eyes, where it had been placed in the form of layers and layers of construct and false ideas that make us feel better and forget we are small and pointless sheep in the workings of existence.

The problem, of course, is that at a certain point (the beginning, really), living in this frame of mind really sucks.

For one, this world lens has no purpose. We are making ourselves miserable- and worse, we're rationalizing it for the conscious purpose of making others miserable. Besides, if everything truly is meaningless, then the fact that it is meaningless is itself meaningless. So we reject the philosophy itself if we enslave ourselves to it and let it make us miserable. Furthermore, the idea that everything is nonsensical and meaningless is no reason to be resentful; rather, this philosophy can be approached as a kind of freedom from the constraints of a meaning imposed by the outside. The rationalization for misery is the same one we could use for an untethered and boundless joy that needs no purpose.

But it's also worth considering that the negative worldview may, quite simply, be wrong. Perhaps the next step in our processes of awareness will be an openness to more possibility rather than a general hopelessness. Enlightenment may provide a different message entirely. We need not accept nihilism as a fundamental truth (that would be almost paradoxical anyway) to represent knowledge of the world. There are other conclusions at which to arrive, even based on similar evidence, and some of them might actually be better.

Regardless, though, of whether the world is meaningless or meaningful, a positive approach to it can be based in logic, rationalization, experience, and even wisdom. To appear innocent, at peace, is not to be naïve. A "childlike" joy does not necessarily imply that one is like a child.

To know is to take on any view which is best. To know is to create choice. To know is freedom, and freedom can, and for some of us even should be the reason for a positive and uncomplicated joy.