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Short, interesting and easily digestible for the lay reader. The author presents an idiosyncratic view of the everyday understanding of nihilism. Nihilism, on this view, isn’t what your average edgy teenager feels when their hormones kick in. It does not entail an extreme pessimism about life, that life is meaningless and purposeless. Neither is it a philosophical stance about there being no truth-values, whether in ethics or epistemology. Rather, nihilism is roughly construed as the deliberate ignorance of discomforting facts. Choosing to believe in things—be it in relation to God, nature, scientific principles or whatever—simply in order to escape the necessity of confronting the chaos and absurdity of existence; wilful ignorance in the name of comfort. Basically almost what the existentialists were preaching all along.

The author then makes a normative claim that, on his unique interpretation of nihilism, nihilism is something undesirable. But he fails to clarify why this is so; why 'comfort', for example, shouldn't be a justifiable reason for holding a belief. Why is his implicit commitment to a scientific realist epistemology superior to other epistemologies that value wilful ignorance? For a pragmatist, or anyone familiar with William James' views on religion, comfort may well serve as a sufficient basis for belief. The book leaves this tension unresolved.

Not sure about the last chapter on technologies either. Fun, quick read though.