bites

When everything feels impossible

Notes from a nihilist sensibility

Sirus Bouchat

20 Feb 2026 — 3 min read

When it looks like sunrise, but is actually midday. What it feels like is a matter of perspective.

If you've been here for a while, you already know I'm a nihilist.

Not in a pretentious way (I think). Not in a way I hold too tightly (I hope, since that would be ironic at best.) And not in an overly doomerist way (usually). But more in the way that, I find and have found refuge in rejecting the meaning and purpose that others impose. There's power in that.

Lately, everything feels impossible and I feel stuck. Maybe you've felt the impossibility lately, too. The way the bleakness settles in and you end up immersed in a heavy fog that snuck up unannounced. The kind of situation where, even if you haven't moved an inch and you knew the terrain well before you lost sight of it, you suddenly have no idea where the exits are.

There's power in rejecting (at least for now) the need to resolve the impossibility. Ok, so everything is impossible and nothing matters. Eventually that gets boring and settles into, if everything is impossible and nothing matters, then what if I do... THIS! Sometimes that doesn't help, sometimes it's self-destructive, but almost always it creates some movement.

There's also power in befriending the impossibility. Imagine all the work it takes to create the sense that no possibilities for anything exist, or could ever exist again. If I miss any part of teaching statistics (even to people with a lot of math trauma), it's the philosophical knots surrounding who defines possibility and how that differs from probability. The root of it all is uncertainty; declaring something impossible requires a lot of certainty.

So to befriend the impossibility, it helps to touch that certitude and gently tap it on the shoulder with some uncertainty. By that I mean: ask a question. Ask 10 questions. What feels impossible? Who makes it feel impossible? What do I wish were possible but clearly isn't, and why isn't it possible? When did things become impossible, and why were they possible before? How could they become possible again, what would need to change?

The goal of asking questions isn't necessarily to press the feeling of impossibility until it cracks (although that might happen). The goal, in part, is to assess its shape and contours, see whether it has limits or bounds. I think some people (myself sometimes included) find the feeling of impossibility scary, overwhelming, demobilizing, crushing. Giving things shape sometimes takes away that power to overwhelm, even if it doesn't resolve the underlying situation.

It would be irresponsible of me to suggest that nihilism necessarily implies impossibility (it doesn't). What I mean to say is, sometimes my nihilism gets me into trouble. It makes it easier for me to trip into a ditch: if nothing matters, then everything feels meaningless and that suggests any action or striving is a futile, impossible task. But that meaning-making isn't true, the implication doesn't hold. Just because things don't inherently matter, doesn't at all mean that everything is impossible.

On the contrary: not being confined by particular meaning makes so many more things possible than would be true otherwise. It's an invitation to what if.

That what if is sometimes the key to unlocking and defanging the feeling of impossibility. Consider this your invitation to ask that specter of impossibility some questions (imagine inviting it to tea 🥺), but also your invitation to let things be impossible and not let that matter too much.