I mean yeah, evolution of consciousness is a one-way-road as you say. But I don't know if I would see this dreary nihilism as simply the inevitable attitude that follows from a more evolved consciousness. It's not that we're now just realizing that the world is full of catastrophe, that we're getting smarter and more aware, I think it's tied up in a lot of other things and it's maybe more simple than that. It's just the mood of the times, for all kinds of reasons.
If you say that the change of attitude is always a product of disembedding from previous false established understandings and seeing through them, then that's a fucking dreary fatalist idea in itself, because where do we go from there?
Well in as far as a change in attitude is a departure, however partially, however violently, from a previous consensus or understanding, then does that not involve some retrospective invalidation of part (or the whole) of the previous belief-structure? Not to make it sound like a crisp series of steps. Even if we grant this, which might not even be necessary - just because we retrospectively invalidate something doesn't that it is permanently invalid. We may come to invalidate the invalidation, which would bring us back, but not back
proper (if we do posit such a development as being one-way, which I think is almost incontestable).
But I do see the necessity of reckoning with something that is ultimately dreary, because it may secure something that is ultimately blissful: namely, the dematerialization of intelligence. Is it that intelligence matter acquires vitality, organic life, at some point, which it then posits at its essence?
The fatalism, from my understanding of that term, would be that we are destined to shed the beliefs that don't optimize, or at least sustain, the ever-ramifying complexity of intelligent matter. To add a fundamentalist element, we would be shedding that which is unessential - but that which is unessential may pass, in our eyes, as essential, until it is eviscerated, leaving us trembling. This line of argument does take its positions: that all beliefs and values serve to stabilize and incubate an evolving intelligence, and those beliefs and values are liable to change depending on the circumstances/scope of the current material regime of intelligence. Perhaps I'm not trying hard enough to lean toward objectivity, maybe this is just where my belief happens to lie currently.
Where do we go from here? I think there can be a positive elaboration upon nihilism (I'm using nihilism here, loosely, to encompass the scientistic, secular, pseudo-solipsistic ideologies that seem, from a low-resolution glance, to be increasingly underpinning the common sense, even if that increase is disproportionately felt in come cultures over others. We could argue that these cultures are the ones who are upstream from the others, insofar as a globalist hegemony has been taking shape).
What would this elaboration look like? Perhaps this is a feeble beginning, but we could start with reevaluating what we ought to identify as, and why we ought to identify as one thing over another. Pragmatic, if I understand it. We can still identify as people, but that one be one category nested in a series of categories, all of which can be treated as unessential. The category of person, within the category of human, within the category of organism, within the category of intelligent matter. We could even fill those in, and add mediating layers or additional extreme layers.
I see the dreariness ("alone" in the universe; fated to decompose into lifeless matter; political complexity that is nearly impossible to contend with or affect; humans having less and less of a role in the cockpit of cosmic intelligence; capitalism; etc) as something that will have to be reckoned with, and is being reckoned with, before we can build something that will prove to be orders of magnitude more enduring. More enduring than what? Any anthropocentrism, humanism, or even vitalism that is precariously predicated upon the supposed fundamentality of that-which-we-derive-meaning-from. We
need, too much, to derive meaning from the objectively meaningful things. Hell, I even think it's possible to preserve happiness, love, etc into such developments.
As dreary as it is, not only do I believe there is always a way forward, but I'm actually beginning to see it. It hasn't collapsed yet.