Any Nihilists here?

[Belacqua]

So, it seems I may be the only nihilist here... somewhat unexpected on an atheist site, tbh.

You got me thinking about it, for sure.

I think in the end I am happy to admit that any meaning in the world is made by people. It is not something that physics or chemistry can detect, and if all the people went away there would be no meaning. 

But I do think that what people make is real. The meanings that people have made have real existence independent of me. They can be studied, debated, held objectively at arm's length and pondered. 

While some things are assigned meaning only by individuals, others are such enormous group projects that the disappearance of any given person would scarcely affect anything. 

The biggest messiest cases are probably the world's major religions. These are huge ziggurats of interconnected meanings -- evolving, sometimes self-contradictory, sometimes based on lies -- but nonetheless having existence in some more-than-personal way. 

I'm thinking of the things that Levi-Strauss or Roland Barthes studied. Those guys could pick out and analyze the various ways in which the things we tell each other build meaning in the world. Our myths and our assumptions can be detected as tacitly conveyed in ways that even the speakers didn't knowingly intend. 

Or think of something like the Louvre Museum. Everything there is man-made, and everything there (from the entrance gates to the Mona Lisa) is so replete with cultural meaning that you could never articulate all of it. All cultural productions form a world of interconnected meanings that we are thrown into at birth, and, for the individual, has an inescapable given-ness nearly as strong as the laws of physics.

Even if none of this meaning exists for the snails in my garden, it nonetheless exists for people, really truly.

(Though I may have simply missed the point of what you mean when you say "nihilist.")