Life is meaningless - Ugly Xmas Sweater

A classic knit-look Christmas pattern – snowflakes, borders, a starry sky – in which three green dinosaurs watch a red meteor streak toward them, a little gift box riding along. Above and below, in festive cross-stitch lettering – life is meaningless, everything dies. It is a cheerful-looking sweater with the bleakest punchline in natural history.

An asteroid roughly 10 kilometres wide struck what is now the Yucatán Peninsula in Mexico about 66 million years ago, leaving the Chicxulub crater. The impact and the dust, fire and darkness that followed triggered the end-Cretaceous mass extinction, which wiped out the non-avian dinosaurs and around three quarters of all species. Birds are the dinosaurs that survived.

Nihilism, from the Latin nihil – nothing, is the view that life has no inherent meaning, purpose or value, and that moral and religious claims have no objective foundation. Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi used the term philosophically in 1799; Ivan Turgenev's novel Fathers and Sons (1862) made it famous through the nihilist Bazarov. Existential nihilism is the version on this sweater.

Cosmic nihilism is the view that, seen from the scale of the universe, human life and everything we care about is insignificant – the cosmos is vast, indifferent and will outlast every species, as the dinosaurs found out. It does not have to mean that nothing matters to us; it means that meaning is not written into the universe itself.

Nihilism says life has no inherent meaning and stops there. Existentialism, with Sartre, agrees there is no given meaning but holds that we create it through our choices – existence precedes essence. Absurdism, with Camus, says the clash between our hunger for meaning and a silent universe can never be resolved, and that we should live in lucid revolt against it rather than despair or escape.

It is the last line of Albert Camus' essay The Myth of Sisyphus (1942). Sisyphus is condemned to roll a rock uphill forever; Camus sees in him every human life. Happiness comes not from finishing the task but from fully accepting and owning the struggle – the struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man's heart. Meaningless, yes; but not hopeless.

Not in the sense the word is usually used. Nietzsche diagnosed nihilism as the crisis of a culture in which the highest values devalue themselves – God is dead, he writes in The Gay Science (1882). But he wanted to overcome it, through a revaluation of all values and an affirmation of life captured in amor fati, the love of one's fate. In his notes he called himself Europe's first perfect nihilist – one who had lived nihilism through to its end and left it behind.

Yes – it reads instantly as an ugly Christmas sweater from across the room, and the dinosaur punchline rewards anyone who looks closer. It suits philosophy students, existentialists, dinosaur fans and everyone who finds forced festivity harder than the cold. The design comes as a sweatshirt, premium hoodie, T-shirt and mug, and as a beanie and snapback cap.