For much of our lives, the future functions like a silent supervisor. It tells us who we are allowed to be now, based on who we are expected to become later. We learn to tolerate discomfort, uncertainty, and delay because the future promises coherence and offers hope that things will make sense eventually.

But for some people, that promise and hope can begin to weaken. Life’s circumstances can vary, and at times, it may not work out as we expect.

I remember a scene in Richard Linklater’s movie ‘Boyhood’ that captures this experience with painful clarity. As her son prepares to leave for college, the mother suddenly breaks down; not out of sentimentality, but confusion. She lists the milestones she was told to expect: marriage, children, master’s degree, dream job, and stability. And then, with quiet disbelief, she realises that her life has just gone by.

Her grief is not only about her child leaving home; it is about the unsettling realisation that life does not culminate in meaning simply because it follows a plan. The future, once imagined as a source of coherence, falls silent.

As the future no longer seems sufficiently solid to organise our sense of self around it, we begin to feel empty. But even beneath that emptiness lies something closer to ‘nihilism’—the unsettling sense that the narratives we relied on to give meaning no longer carry the same authority.

Nihilism is usually imagined as dramatic despair or philosophical extremism. In reality, it often appears quietly, in ordinary lives. It manifests as a loss of conviction that any particular future will ultimately justify the present; it is the moment when goals feel arbitrary, identities provisional, and long-term plans strangely hollow.

For people who have built their lives around a specific professional or personal future, this can be destabilising. When that future becomes inaccessible, or simply less compelling than it once was, the question is no longer “How do I get there?” but “why was I so certain it mattered in the first place?”

This question can feel dangerous. After all, modern life depends on the belief that things are progressing towards a meaningful end. Without this belief, what really motivates effort? What anchors identity? What prevents everything from feeling pointless?

And so, nihilism is often resisted. We rush to replace one future with another. We search for new plans, new labels, new trajectories. But in doing so, we may miss that nihilism is quietly revealing: that much of the meaning we attributed to the future was borrowed rather than inherent.

Existential thinkers have long argued that meaning is not discovered, waiting for us somewhere in the future. In fact, it is constructed temporarily, imperfectly, and often retrospectively. When the future loses authority, what collapses is not meaning itself, but the illusion that meaning was guaranteed.

We are taught that effort leads to alignment, that thoughtful planning results in a coherent life. When this does not occur, the resulting emptiness feels personal, even though it is structural and philosophical at its core.

Yet nihilism need not lead to despair and paralysis. In fact, stripped of its drama, it can be quietly liberating.

If the future no longer holds the power to justify the present, the present is no longer merely a means to an end. It is no longer something to be endured until life “begins”. Attention dramatically shifts. Awareness sharpens. Life becomes less about accumulation and more about experience.

This is not a call to abandon ambition or responsibility. Rather, it is an invitation to relate to them differently. When we stop demanding that our work and relationships guarantee lifelong meaning, we may begin to experience them as transient, limited, and therefore real.

A nihilistic lens, paradoxically, can deepen presence. If nothing carries ultimate meaning, then small moments are no longer overshadowed by their utility. Conversations do not have to lead somewhere. Days do not have to prove their worth. Even uncertainty loses some of its threat, because it no longer represents a deviation from a promised path.

When the expectation that life must always have meaning is loosened, we can pay attention to what is already there.

As therapists, we propagate this phenomenon quite a lot—mindfulness. This attention to the present is not glamorous; it does not come with clarity or reassurance. It is simply the practice of noticing one’s life as it is. Simply said, the relationships that exist now, the work that is being done now, the body that is ageing now, and the city that is being lived in now.

From this perspective, the question shifts. It is no longer “what I am becoming” but “how am I relating to what is already present?” Meaning, if it appears at all, emerges secondarily from engagement rather than projection.

Perhaps the unease that arrives when the future loses its authority is not a problem to be solved. Perhaps it is a threshold, not toward a better plan, but toward a different orientation toward living. One that accepts uncertainty, relinquishes guarantees, and finds a quieter honesty in the present moment.