Why do you keep choosing what destroys you? Nietzsche spent his life observing a pattern that repeats. Infinitely intelligent and capable people who never get anywhere, and not because the world conspired against them, not because they had bad luck, not because they lacked opportunity, but because they themselves, choice, by choice, day after day, built their own prison. The key is in their hands, it always has been, but they're afraid to use it, afraid of what they'll find
on the other side of the door. Nietzsche wasn't just the philosopher who declared the death of God. He was someone deeply concerned with what makes a human being truly unhappy. While other thinkers fantasized about what makes us happy, he studied the opposite, what destroys us from within, And the answer he found is brutal. We are not victims of life,
We are victims of ourselves. If you constantly seek pleasure and comfort, Nietsch think you may have already lost, because the first step toward misery is pursuing comfort as the ultimate goal of existence. He saw in this a terrifying warning about humanity's future. The image of the last man. The last man is a creature that emerges when old values disappear with nothing to replace them. He's someone reduced to seeking only comfort and avoiding any discomfort, without general
direction in life, without purpose that justifies the effort. For nietzsure this was an enormous opportunity in the fall of traditional values, but also a terrible prospect that we all become passive and lazy people. The last man desires comfort in all things. He sees no meaning in struggle or effort. He's not creative enough to create his own values. His will is not strong enough to motivate him to action. He allows life to pass without taking any control over it.
He has no mastery over himself or the world, and so he moves through existence in a form of gentle despair. And the most terrible thing is that the last man doesn't perceive his own misery. He blinks, he smiles, He says, we invented happiness. But this happiness is empty, its absence of pain, not presence of meaning, its comfort not fulfillment, its distraction not purpose. Nietzsche saw the last man as the greatest danger to humanity, not because he's monstrous, but
because he's mediocre. Because he represents the systematic waste of all human potential because he transforms creatures capable of greatness into passive consumers of comfort. And the worst part, because he's satisfied with it. He seeks nothing more. He misses nothing.
He just exists, comfortably empty. Each day is apparently pleasant due to the endless pursuit of comfort, but in the long run, there's a huge hole, a void that cannot be filled with more comfort, because what's missing isn't pleasure, its meaning, its purpose. It's the feeling of building something that matters, of becoming someone, of living, not just existing.
It's not clear if one day this person will wake up and realize their existence was for nothing, or if they'll persist in this unhappiness until death, but one thing is certain, it would be a tragic waste of human potential. Nietzsure thought that to access great joys, we must seek great discomforts. This is a central theme throughout his philosophy, whether in the image of Zarathustra descending from enlightenment to be despised by the world, or through the joyful and
powerful person who strengthens their resolve through continuous suffering. For him truly valuable happiness only comes through the conscious choice to suffer, and this for two fundamental reasons. The first is quite straightforward. Too much comfort makes us fragile. Nietzsche
had no optimy, mystic vision of the world. He knew that suffering is inevitable, that life will bring difficulties whether you're prepared or not, and that these difficulties will be even more painful and destructive if they catch us unprepared, if we don't develop the capacity to endure them. The only way to become strong enough to endure life's inevitable suffering is to choose the path of suffering voluntarily. It's training,
it's gradually exposing ourselves to increasing discomforts. It's building tolerance. Just as you can't expect to run a marathon without training, you can't expect to endure life's crises without having developed emotional and psychological resistance. Just as a new song can seem annoying at first, but over time we come to love it through familiarity, Nietsure wants us to learn to appreciate discomfort through continuous exposure. Not because suffering is good
in itself. He doesn't romanticize pain, but because it prepares us for the inevitable, because it makes us capable of facing whatever comes without breaking. The second reason is more subtle but deeply insightful. The more pain we endure, the more our freedom increases. After all, to do anything worthwhile, we have to be able to endure suffering. Whether it's building a great project like Alexander the Great, creating fantastic art like da Vinci, or simply becoming masters of our
own lives, will have to endure difficulties. For nietzsure, only through learning suffering do we cultivate the strength to be truly free. How autonomous we are is directly proportional to how much we're willing to endure to achieve our will. And if we can't endure discomfort, then we won't be free. We'll be slaves to our own limitations, prisoners of our fragility. Think of it this way. Someone who can't endure criticism can't build anything public. Someone who can't handle physical effort
can't sculpt their own body. Someone who can't tolerate financial risk can't be an entrepreneur. Someone who can't endure temporary solitude can't do develop independent thinking. In each case, the inability to endure specific discomfort becomes a prison that limits what that person can do or become. And the more we expand our capacity to endure different types of discomfort,
the more possibilities open up. Not because discomfort itself is valuable, but because it's the price of admission for almost everything worthwhile in life. It's the toll we have to pay to cross the bridge between who we are and who we could be. But why so much emphasis on strength? What is this power? For? Nietzschere is often presented as a philosopher obsessed with power, and there's truth to that. He thought we all have a will to power that
wants to exercise itself in the world and in ourselves. However, he's not a fetishest of power. He thinks power and strength are important prerequisites for human flourishing. This is best illustrated in how he thinks people behave when they're powerless. For him, powerlessness is not not virtue. It brings out the worst of human nature, and this manifests primarily in his concept of resentiment. Resentiment is an emotion we're all familiar with. Envy arises when we see someone more prosperous
or successful in a field we value. But envy is not motivational, it's destructive. Its goal is not to elevate us to their level, but to bring them down to ours, to relieve our resentment without having to face the fact that we may be inadequate according to our own standards. This is evidently an unpleasant emotion to feel, and Nietzschure isn't the first to point it out. The resentful person lives in a constant state of denial about what they
really want. If I resent a person with a better body than mine, this reveals that I desire the physical position therein, but if I'm powerless, I don't have the capacity to achieve that success. Instead, the only route is to declare that it's not a position worth having. We become the fox from Aesop's fable, who, when he can't reach the desired grapes, declares they were probably sour anyway. But this self deception cannot bring true satisfaction because it
represses what we truly desire. If we resent something, we can't strive for it, even if deep down it's our truest desire. And the cruelty of this trick is evident. It converts what could have been motivation to strengthen our will into a guarantee that will never be satisfied. What could have been a temporary obstacle becomes permanent amputation of
our route to happiness, and it doesn't stop there. Resentiment also encourages us to hate the object of our repressed desire and try to take revenge on a life we feel has wronged us. We start developing entire moralities based on our powerlessness. We declare that what we cannot have actually shouldn't be desired by anyone, that it's immoral, that it's superficial, that it's empty. And so the resentful person becomes a preacher not of virtues he genuinely values, but
of prohibitions based on his own incapacities. He builds an entire philosophical system to justify why everyone should avoid what he secretly desires but cannot achieve, and the more people he convinces, the more validated his narrative of self deception feels.
This is one of Nietzsche's most brutal psychological insights because it forces us to question how many of our moral beliefs are genuine and how many are just rationalizations of our powerlessness, and according to Nietzsche, we fall into this state of powerlessness because we fear power. We associate it with some of history's greatest atrocities without recognizing that all of humanity's great goods also required power. And the power Niature has in mind is not merely physical. It implies
a kind of personal overcoming. It means reft using to submit your will to another's, recognizing yourself as sovereign of your own life with all the crushing pressure and radical freedom that implies. It means not allowing others, morality, or taste to dictate what you do, being completely in control and taking full responsibility for existence. It's easy for this to become superficial wisdom. But let's pause for a moment
and consider how radical this idea of freedom is. According to Nietzsche, the truly free are not subject even to the rules of morality. We would take full ownership of our decisions and refuse to submit our will to anyone else's. It's an independence of thought, will, and action greater than
that proposed by almost any other philosopher. And yet it's what Nietzschure suggests we begin to do in order not to be consumed by resentment and weakness, and, contrary to popular belief, this form of power eventually becomes benevolent by itself. As he expresses, the state in which we harm others is rarely as pleasant as the one in which we benefit our peers. This may seem counterintuitive. How would someone completely free of moral restraints not become a tyrant? But
Nietzsche had an answer for this. He believed that the truly powerful person doesn't need to dominate others, doesn't need to prove anything, doesn't need to compensate for internal insecurities through external displays of strength. True power, for Natsure, is silent and self contained. It's the capacity to say no when necessary, to establish boundaries, to stand firm in your convictions.
But it's also the capacity to be generous without expecting anything in return, to be kind without it being interpreted as weakness, to help others, not out of moral obligation, but from an overflow of internal strength. The resentful and weak person needs external moral rules to behave well, because without them, their envy and bitterness would lead them to destructive actions. But the truly power person doesn't need these chains because their inner strength is so abundant that it
naturally expresses itself constructively. This is the paradox of Nietzsche in power. The more you have, the less you need to display it or use it against others. But I want to dig deeper into this theme of independence, because if there's something Nietzsche considers a sure route to despair, it's being too influenced by the crowds. In Satra's play No Exit, the character Garsan famously closes the drama by saying,
hell is other people. This line was taken out of context and misinterpreted to portray Sarcha as a profound misanthrope, But the truth is more complicated. Sartra was referring to the human tendency to fear other's judgment and for our self image to be regulated through our peers opinions. Nietzsche shares this concern, and he points out a human tendency that can cause us much misery, remaining too long in others company, so that we become alienated from our own character.
One of the images nietzsure uses repeatedly is that of the herd. This concept encompasses most of society, and he saw them as having broadly speaking, the same opinions and life perspectives. But he didn't think people were naturally this way. He said, it's within almost anyone's power to cultivate their individuality, to be more satisfied, to achieve a greater level of
self development and understanding. However, in his opinion, the herd has a violent reaction to any attempt to differentiate oneself. Above all, the herd values predictability, and the more similar people are to each other and to their own pasts, the more predictable they can be. Therefore, the herd is an obstacle for anyone trying to embrace radical freedom and individuation, and it will exert social and physical pressure to return
them to a narrow form of thinking and living. And this pressure is incredibly strong because it doesn't come only from outside, but also from within. We internalize the Herd's expectations from an early age. They become part of how we think about ourselves, of what we consider possible, of what we consider acceptable. And when we try to differentiate ourselves, we're not just fighting external pressure, we're fighting an entire internal structure we've built based on others expectations. This is
why individuation is so difficult. It's not just a matter of doing different things. It's a matter of completely rebuilding your internal value system, of questioning every belief you have, of asking is this really mine? Or did I just internalize it from my environment? And in most cases you'll discover that much of what you think is you is actually a reflection of others expectations. By itself, this social pressure wouldn't necessarily be seen as a bad thing, after all,
every society needs certain norms to function. But Nietzsche doesn't see this as the subject genuinely overcome whatever impulse they have that's unacceptable to the herd, but rather repressing those impulses, pushing them down, denying they exist. And it's this repression that causes deep dissatisfaction and unhappiness. It can even reach unconscious levels, and we'll spend our entire lives seeking an itch we can't find or scratch, in constant dissatisfaction without
any clue about the cause. This is the fate that awaits us if we give ourselves completely to the crowd. It's no wonder that later psychoanalytic thinkers like jung admired Nietzsche's insight into the inner workings of the mind itself. However, unlike some monastic thinkers, Nietzschea doesn't believe we should spend
our entire lives in solitude. One of the main conflicts within Zarathustra's character is the tension between his impulse to go out and interact with people due to his great love for humanity, and his impulse to withdraw to his cave in perfectly individuated solitude. And this is not a conflict that's resolved once and for all. It's a constant tension that must be navigated continuously. Zarathustra descends from the
mountain driven by love and compassion. He wants to share his wisdom, he wants to help people become more than they are. But when he's among them, he feels the weight of conformity, the pressure to adapt, the temptation to dissolve into the crowd. So he returns to solitude, not out of contempt for humanity, but to recover his essence, to remember who he is, to reconnect with his own inner voice that was drowned out by the noise of
other's opinions and then strengthened by solitude. He descends again, and the cycle continues. I believe there's a deep lesson here for all of us. The question of how to balance our individuation with our interaction with others is an open question, and it's one that must be constantly reevaluated. There's no fixed formula, no perfect balance that works forever. It's a continuous dance between connection and solitude, between community
and individuality, between giving to others and preserving yourself. But nietzsure warns us about the possibility of becoming so involved in crowds and communities that we forget ourselves. We become strangers to our own characters. We lose any awareness of what makes us happy or fulfilled, or even of what makes us miserable. We become emotionally numb, and we walk around with glazed dissatisfaction, aware that something is wrong, but
unable to identify what. For nietzscha this is a lamentable state because it's unpleasant and unsatisfying, But it's also a waste of everything unique and wonderful we could have added to the world. There are few among us who don't have to deal with the trials and tribulations of being part of a community. We're social animals, and it's hard to live without others company. But Nietzsche reminds us that we shouldn't forget our own wills just because we repress
our desires to please others. And now we'll see a warning not always associated with Nietzsche, but which I believe is a key part of his overall philosophy. Nietzsche is often associated with a particular type of thinker. He writes with a passionate and irritated style that gives the impression he's an extremely serious man, tormented by what he saw as the philosophical foolishness of people and society around him.
And in this characterization we lose the emphasis Nietzsche placed on a light and gentle approach to life, and that he saw excessive seriousness as a sure sign of a miserable person. But Nietzsche has a very particular view of what he considers seriousness. He sees it as an attitude toward life that is fundamentally unchangeable and not playful, one that considers almost everything as off limits, as something grave
and heavy that cannot be touched with lightness. According to Nietzsche, this permeates us with a kind of artificial seriousness, putting too much pressure both on us and on our lives to be a certain way, to correspond to certain ideals, to reach certain standards, and this can deprive existence of its fundamental wonder of its openness, of its possibility for surprise and transformation. It means we get so involved in how things should be that we forget to enjoy the
world as it actually exists. We get so caught up in our judgments about what's right and wrong, good and bad, that we lose the ability to simply experience life, to play with it, to dance through it. This observation is an extension of many earlier thinkers, from the Buddhists to
the Stoics. It's been pointed out that our attachment to people and things not under our control will bring us unhappiness in the long run, that we suffer not because of things themselves, but because of our expectations about how they ca should be. Nietzsche simply extends this thinking to the area of life to which we're very attached, the area of morality. For him, calling something good is clinging
to a particular way the world should be. In this way, Nietzsche manages to surpass the stoics and frames our own moral system as an attachment that weighs on our characters and thoughts, leading us to despair. On the other hand, he speaks of the joyful thinker who is free from these concerns, who has overcome traditional definitions of morality and value and can instead dance through life. This is part of the doctrine of amorphati, or love of your fate.
He says that ideally we shouldn't want anything to be different, not forward or backward for all eternity. We should have spirits so strong that we could rejoice in what life brings us. But this only works if we free ourselves from the instinct to judge that we inherited from older philosophies and develop the power to rejoice in life unpleasant aspects.
There's a big difference between someone who is cheerful because they've never faced a troubling question and someone who has gone through those questions and discovered a deep love for life. On the other hand, this doctrine of love of fate is what will explore next, and in doing so we'll illuminate the final distinction. Niatzsure makes between the miserable and the joyful, and that's the difference between saying yes to
life and saying no to it. If we consider together all the things Niatsure thinks are conducive to our pronounced misery, things like hatred of discomfort, fear of power, contempt for individualization, and refusal to let go of traditional valuations, they all have something in common, and that is that they're denying some aspect of life, refusing to rejoice in it. The one who hates suffering says no to suffering and runs from it, while the person who fears individualization or power
does the same with their object of terror. Finally, the person obsessed with morality refuses to acknowledge their radical freedom and chains their possibilities with links forged from good and evil. In each case, nietzscha thinks we're denying some fundamental aspect of life, and therefore the solution is to embrace that
aspect instead. So he replaces our hatred of pain with an active search for it, fear of power with will to power, contempt for individualization with love for the individual's idiosyncrasies, and obsession with morality with a revaluation of all values an embrace of radical freedom. In each aspect. Where we have an instinct to feel rejection towards some part of life, Nietschure stops us and forces us to face our fear and embrace it with love instead. This theme is perhaps
most marked in his doctrine of eternal recurrence. This is Nietzsche's thought experiment that asks us to imagine that time's arrow bends into a circle, and that our lives will repeat again, again and again for all eternity. Then he asks us what our honest emotional reaction is to this situation. Are we filled with dread at having to live life over and over with no end in sight? Or are we filled with joy, loving life so much that we're
thrilled to reunite with it once more. He says that if we adopt the first attitude, we're at a fundamental level saying no to life. We're spitting in the face of our own existence and participating in a futile exercise. Whatever our opinion about the relative value of our lives, we're immersed in them now, and the only sensible root forward is to embrace them, love them, and say yes
to them. This is explicitly not a rational doctrine. It only makes sense to adopt the perspective on life that's most practical, and loving life is the best option available. Amor FARTI demands much of our attitude. It suggests that we smile at our pain and love whatever tragedy befalls us. It means being great grateful that we've endured illnesses, and doing all this not with a soft, tranquil heart, as a Stoic philosopher might, but with passionate joy. Here's the
crucial difference between Nietzsche and the Stoics. The Stoics propose tranquil acceptance, a kind of serene resignation before fate. They say, accept what you cannot change without disturbance. But nietzscha goes much further. He doesn't just want acceptance. He wants celebration. He doesn't want you to tolerate your life. He wants you to love it passionately. It means embracing your suffering and kissing it, wishing to see it over and over
for eternity. It's one of the most radical pieces of wisdom Nietzschue wrote, and it seems almost impossible to achieve in its perfect form. How can someone genuinely love their tragedies? How can they wish for their worst experiences to repeat eternally? But perhaps that's exactly the point. Perhaps amor fati isn't about achieving perfection, but about the direction you're headed, about
the attitude you cultivate. Each moment you choose to say yes instead of no, each time you choose to embrace instead of resist, each time you find gratitude even in difficulty, You're moving in the direction of amorphati. However, he thinks it's a perspective worth striving to achieve, because the alternative is living in constant war with reality. It's spending your entire life resisting what is, wishing it were different, and
that's a guaranteed recipe for misery. Lastly, I want to give two warnings about all this advice that are worth keeping in mind. The first is that Nietzsche is known for directing his advice only to a very particular type
of person. While stoicism presents itself as a philosophy for everyone, slaves and emperors, Nietzscha writes explicitly for a very particular type of temperament, one that will only be satisfied by squeezing every last drop out of life, that naturally seeks to dive into difficulty and pain to strengthen their mind. For others, a different path toward happiness might be more advisable. The kind of joy Niatsure promises is on the other side of a great amount of pain. According to him,
its pain we'll learn to love. But surely we must be very careful before trying to follow this path in life. For those who don't desire this extreme pain and this extreme joy, Nietzschure suggests that more moderate paths like stoicism might be preferable. And the other warning is a brief recommendation about how to use Nietzsche's advice in a practical way. It's worth keeping in mind that Nietzschure often writes from a place of deep frustration, Especially in his later works.
He seems almost irritated by the GAP's philosophy, left by how it ignored other paths toward joy by promoting only those in which we renounce our desires and live esthetic lives. He saw the Western philosophical tradition as obsessed with the denial, with renunciation, with saying no to life in the name of abstract ideals, and this frustrated him deeply because he
saw human potential being wasted. He saw people capable of greatness being taught to be small, taught to repress their strongest impulses in the name of moralities that weakened them. At this moment, I strongly encourage you to think critically about which aspects of Nietzsche's philosophy are actually applicable to you, and which ones you don't want to accept. Don't accept his ideas, blindly question everything, including him, because that's exactly
what he'd want you to do. He didn't want disciples, he wanted independent thinkers. There's also the matter that Nietzsche himself was a deeply unhappy man. He spent much of his life suffering from physical and mental illnesses. He died relatively young, he spent his final years in a state of insanity, and perhaps that's relevant. If we're going to analyze his advice on how to live a happy life, perhaps we should consider not just what he said, but
how he lived. And to conclude, I quote one of my favorite lines from the German thinker, he who fights with monsters must be careful not to become a monster himself. And remember that if you gaze long into an abyss, the abyss also gazes into you. You have one life, one single chance to exist in this universe, and it's passing right now at this exact moment, while you're listening to this time is running irreversibly. Every second that passes
is a second that never comes back. Never. You stop when you realize you're messing up, when you recognize that every choice of comfort is killing you slowly, that every time you run from discomfort, you build your own prison, That every time you lie to yourself about what you want, you waste a day that's never coming back. Stop when you finally understand that no one is going to save you, that there's no perfect moment, that life isn't going to get easier, and that every day you wait is a
day lost forever. The question isn't whether you're going to suffer you will. The question is are you going to suffer building something worth while? Or are you going to suffer wasting your only shot at this existence? You stop wasting your life when you finally truly live