How come nihilism is so popular today?

Question

I've been trying to attack this question (or more precisely, come up with an answer to that fact) for some time now, but after a while of research I'm suddenly not so sure of the reason the situation is as it is.\n\nI used to think that nihilism today is so popular because of the uprising of positivism in science and scientism in the past century, but I'm not exactly sure anymore. I know some blame it today for post-modernism, but I'm not sure it's quite correct too. So, I'd like to see what people here think is the core issue that made room for the popularity (of course there are those who will argue with me about its popularity too) of nihilism in the last few decades.\n\nI should say, while it is not directly related, I am going to connect atheism in some way to nihilism, as in my opinion they both came from the same source last century, but I would definitely accept other point of views here.\n\nEdit: while writing a comment to @GeoffreyThomas' answer, I realized the two definitions of nihilism I'm talking about:\n\n1. Postmodern nihilism - the postmodern position that says "there's no one truth", which leads to a nihilism that denies objectivity, and is more popular today because, well, postmodern is quite popular today as it's a new school in philosophy.\n\n2. Existential nihilism - the existential crisis of "there's no meaning to life, we are nothing compared to the billions of years of the universe", which leads to a nihilism that denies any sort of hope and aspiration for a meaning.\n\nWhile I'm more interested in the nihilism that's rooted in the second definition, I'd love to hears answers about them both.

Answer 1

So it's worth noting two things: postmodernity is more of an affect and a rejection of the idea of modernist philosophy, wherein the latter believes in prescribing some narrative about progress or some kind of specific conception of what can constitute "good" politics or a life well-lived. So postmodern philosophy is not necessarily a view that invites a positive prescription, but more of one that rejects that philosophy is in the business of ascribing a view like "such and such is the correct political view to hold".

The second note I want to make is in the respect to postmodernism's approach to truth. Postmodernism is not tied to a view of objectivity other than by virtue of ascribing a grand narrative like a political ideology being justified in some way. One could believe the latter while also believing in a kind of objectivity, just not one that is justified by a bigger analytic philosophy that claims to exhaust what truth is.

With that said, the reason nihilism seems popular is because of the acceptance that meaning can't be derived from certain happenings or experiences by virtue of the experiences themselves. This is in part because of what you've characterized as the existential(ist) nihilism: one that denies that our living fulfilling lives can be cashed out with some instruction book on how to live. So people then popularize and linger on this fact, stating that if this is true, it can't be the case that any value can be derived from anything. I characterize this as a sort of defeatism about value, given that they haven't entertained any other idea of how we could derive objective value from anything.