Nietzsche The Life Coach
There’s a sensitive young man underneath all of that posturing
“I am not a man. I am dynamite!”
When people discuss the works of Friedrich Nietzsche, these are the types of quotes they usually bring up. Self-exhortations full of bombast and hyperbole were kind of his whole vibe. I mean, Nietzsche was a guy who wrote an autobiography with chapters titled “Why I Am So Clever” and “Why I Write Such Good Books.”
This attitude falls in line with the rest of Nietzsche’s philosophy. His worldview is one that prizes strength, vitality, and dominance above all. There isn’t much room for humility there. But if you know anything about Nietzsche’s actual life, you know that he came nowhere close to embodying these ideals in his day-to-day existence. I once described him to my wife as a “weak, sickly, no-pussy-getting loser.” In fact, Nietzsche’s life was so diametrically opposed to his philosophy that you can’t help but wonder if his beliefs were nothing more than a huge cope. He was like a poor guy that’s always talking about having “a millionaire mindset.”
did a fantastic job breaking all of this down at ’ NOVITATE conference last fall. I’d recommend watching the video below in full. It’s as entertaining as it is enlightening. There’s also a longer five hour breakdown available on Darryl’s Martyr Made podcast. I recently listened to the entire thing and it was my favorite piece of media I’ve consumed all year.However, even if Nietzsche’s writings were just a cope, I still agree with large parts of them. Yes, I believe hierarchies exist. Yes, I believe that certain ways of being are objectively better than others and lead to more desirable outcomes. Yes, I believe it is extremely important to strive for excellence, and that sometimes the pursuit of excellence will set you at odds with your peers, but you can’t let that deter you. Just because Nietzsche didn’t fully manifest these values doesn’t mean they’re not valid. There’s a recurring theme of growth and self-betterment in his writing that I think is useful for everyone, no matter your philosophical bent or political persuasion.
But that’s not the Nietzsche I’m interested in discussing today. The Nietzsche I want to discuss is the real one underneath all of the bluster. More importantly, I want to discuss certain quotes of his that shine a light on the person behind the persona. When I read these quotes, I find myself quite moved by them. I’m moved because I see a sensitive man who is in tremendous pain, fighting like hell to find silver linings in a life full of dark clouds. I see genuine optimism in these quotes. He’s not teaching the reader how to be strong and dominate the world around them. Instead, he’s showing how one can maintain dignity and hope when they’re at their lowest.
The Eternal Recurrence and Amor Fati
The Eternal Recurrence is a concept that many people are familiar with, mostly because it was popularized on season 1 of True Detective. It’s the whole “Time is a flat circle” idea. We are born into this life and are doomed to repeat it over and over again, doing the exact same things and getting the exact same results as all of our previous iterations. Below is Nietzsche’s description of it in full:
“What, if some day or night a demon were to steal after you into your loneliest loneliness and say to you: ‘This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh and everything unutterably small or great in your life will have to return to you, all in the same succession and sequence - even this spider and this moonlight between the trees, and even this moment and I myself. The eternal hourglass of existence is turned upside down again and again, and you with it, speck of dust!’
Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who spoke thus?... Or how well disposed would you have to become to yourself and to life to crave nothing more fervently than this ultimate eternal confirmation and seal?”
Some might interpret this through a lens of nihilist despair, saying that life is completely out of our control and nothing means anything. But I see it as something different. I see a guy desperately trying to convince himself to view his own life in a positive light, not for the tragedy it really was.
Nietzsche’s life, for lack of a better term, absolutely sucked. His father died when he was only four years old. His baby brother died the following year. For the rest of his life, he was stuck with his mother and younger sister, who by all accounts were awful women. Now, Nietzsche might not be the most reliable narrator when it comes to the women in his life, but his sister spent her last years on earth palling around with Nazis, including Hitler himself. So I’ll take his word for it on this one.
Things seemed to be on track for him once he got to college. A brilliant student, he became the chair of classical philology at the University of Basel at the age of 24, making him one of the youngest tenured Classics professors on record, even to this day. Things went downhill from there though. His first published work, The Birth of Tragedy, was not well received and he became something of an outcast in the academic community. His health also steeply declined during this period. He dealt with constant migraines and violent indigestion which left him incapacitated for days on end. However, doctors were never able to make a clear diagnosis of his ailments. It’s entirely possible that it was all in his head.
Things became so bad that he had to resign from the university at the age of 34. He then spent the rest of his life living off of a meager pension, broke, isolated, sick, and mad at the world. He also wrote some of the most influential philosophy books ever put to paper.
So imagine you’re Nietzsche. You’re clearly a man of great talents and intellect. Your life had all of this promise, but somehow you’ve squandered it and found yourself cast out alone, dealing with tremendous physical and emotional pain on a daily basis. You have no wife, few friends, and even fewer admirers of your work. Wouldn’t you feel pretty awful about this? I’m sure Nietzsche did. I’m sure it ate him alive. I think he felt so bad that he needed to conjure up some imaginary existential challenge to talk himself into accepting his fate. At his core, I don’t think he wanted to lash out at the world and be bitter about his situation. He wanted to make peace and live with it. The Eternal Recurrence was simply the best idea he could come up with.
I doubt Nietzsche believed the Eternal Recurrence was real. He didn’t seriously think we were going to repeat our lives on an endless loop. It was simply a state of mind that he aspired to. It was wishful thinking. He wanted to become “well disposed” to his own shitty life, not just in this one instance, but for a theoretically unlimited amount of times.
Because from a certain point of view, the Eternal Recurrence is real. You only get one life. There’s no difference between living it once or an infinite amount of times on repeat. In both scenarios, it’s only going to unfold in one extremely specific way. There are no mulligans. No changes are allowed to be made. This whole thing was a thought experiment to help Nietzsche come to terms with his life and the way it had shaken out. He was telling himself, “I know it sucks, but it’s okay.” It’s a very sad but noble pursuit.
He simplified this concept, some might say made it even more poetic, a few years later in his (semi-insane) autobiography Ecce Homo. Instead of talking about some demon that informs you of the Eternal Recurrence, he simply discusses the concept of Amor Fati, or “Love of Fate.”
“My formula for greatness in a human being is amor fati: that one wants nothing to be different, not forward, not backward, not in all eternity. Not merely bear what is necessary, still less conceal it—all idealism is mendacity in the face of what is necessary—but love it.”
For all his talk of dominance, aristocracy, and Master and Slave Morality, Nietzsche said his ultimate conception of greatness is to accept and love your life as it is, even if you are a sick, lonely, poor, celibate loser. I don’t know if he genuinely believed that, and I’m sure there were some days where he didn’t. But at least he was trying. He was trying to fight through his misery and find some measure of peace. That’s admirable.
“Have you ever said yes to a single joy?”
My favorite Nietzsche quote can be found in his most famous work, Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Part philosophical tract, part incredibly weird fictional parable, this is the kind of book only Nietzsche could write. Here, the protagonist Zarathustra speaks to his disciples and tells them:
“Have you ever said Yes to a single joy? O my friends, then you said Yes to all woe as well. All things are entangled, ensnared, enamored; if you ever wanted one thing twice, if you ever said, ‘You please me, happiness! Abide, moment!’ then you wanted everything to return!”
What he’s saying here is that happiness and sorrow are a package deal. You cannot have the good without the bad. I thought about this quote a lot back when I was still trying to build a career in stand-up comedy.
If I say “I want to be a professional stand-up comedian,” I’m saying that I want to tell great jokes and make money doing it. I want to perform at comedy clubs and get big laughs. I want to be accepted into festivals and perform on TV. I want all of the things that come with the dream. But if I say I want all of those things, I’m also saying that I want to tell bad jokes, to do terrible shows, to have no one laugh, to be rejected by bookers and festivals. I’m saying I want to fail. Because you absolutely must fail and learn before you can achieve any kind of success. Nothing great comes without a price. So I can’t get mad whenever I struggle, because I said yes to those struggles when I said yes to success. I tried my hardest to keep that in mind when things were not going the way I wanted them to, which was most of the time.
This concept doesn’t just apply to the arts. It applies to regular jobs as well. Let’s imagine you say that you want to have a successful career in sales. When you do that, you’re not just saying yes to making the sale and earning a great commission and getting promoted. You’re saying yes to being told no, to struggling to hit your quota, to having people hang up on you, to having deals you thought were a sure thing fall through, to anything bad that might happen in the course of doing your job. You’re saying yes to all of it.
This idea is so brilliant because it applies to every one of us. And it certainly applied to Nietzsche.
Nietzsche wanted, more than anything, to be seen as a great philosophical mind. He was, but he went unrecognized in his own time. He did believe that his recognition would come one day, though. See the below passage from Ecce Homo:
“I know my fate. One day my name will be associated with the memory of something tremendous — a crisis without equal on earth, the most profound collision of conscience, a decision that was conjured up against everything that had been believed, demanded, hallowed so far.”
Ultimately, Nietzsche was proven right. His ideas around “The Death of God” (Something he lamented, not gloated over, contrary to some interpretations) foreshadowed all of the atrocities that were to come during the 20th century. In Nietzsche’s eyes, once we cast aside religion (which had been the foundation of our sense of meaning for thousands of years) in favor of a rationalist and scientific worldview, terrible things would rush in to fill the void. Nietzsche was no fan of Christianity, but he knew that by discarding it so quickly we were setting ourselves up for calamity.
But all of that came later, after Nietzsche was already gone. When he was alive and had to wake up every day to face the world, he was a failure. He had no real readership other than some friends and acquaintances, and even they were just buying his books as a favor. I doubt they grasped the true import of what was in those pages. Instead, they were probably having conversations with each other along the lines of, “Have you talked to Friedrich lately? He seems like he’s having a tough time. And did you read his latest book? What the hell was that part about being dynamite?”
They didn’t know that he would one day become Nietzsche. To them, he was just Friedrich, their weird friend that wrote crazy books no one read. He wasn’t a guy who inspired a lot of confidence in his peers.
So what did he do in this scenario? He once again used his philosophy to save himself emotionally. He told himself that his problems were just part of the process of becoming who he wanted to be. So many great philosophers went unrecognized in their own time and lived lonely lives as a result. If he wanted to be like them, he had to pay the price. And maybe by paying a higher price, by suffering more than any of them, he could become greater and more renowned than them as well.
It’s faulty logic, sort of like the whole sad clown thing comedians love to cling to. But it was the best he could do under the circumstances. It was something to keep him going, to keep him thinking and writing, even in his darkest moments. What was the alternative? Roll over, waste away and die? Thank God he didn’t. If that was his fate, the world would have been deprived of some of its greatest philosophical works.
Why
“He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how.”
This is probably Nietzsche’s most famous quote, other than “God is dead.” It’s touted by everyone, from football coaches to fitness bros to grindset crypto hustlers on YouTube. But how does this apply to Nietzsche? What was his “Why?” More importantly, what was the “How” he had to bear?
I’ve listed plenty of Nietzsche’s failures already, but none were more spectacular than his failures with women. The man was never married. He never even had a girlfriend. The closest he came was with a woman named Louise “Lou” Salomé, but that was an absolute farce from the start. Nietzsche was hopelessly in love with her, but she never took him seriously as a potential mate. She only viewed him as a friend (ouch) and collaborator in philosophy (double ouch). Nietzsche proposed to her several times, and she always rejected him. In fact, at one point, he asked his close friend Paul Rée (who was also Salomé’s friend and in love with her) to propose to her on his behalf. That’s some shit you do in middle school, not as an adult man trying to find a wife.
One of the most ridiculous pictures I’ve ever seen is of Nietzsche, Salomé and Rée, taken around 1882. Nietzsche and Rée are leading a cart like horses, and Salomé is the one cracking the whip. It’s a perfect encapsulation of how humiliating the whole relationship was, and Nietzsche agreed to capture it for posterity with a photograph. I mean, look at this shit. Look at Nietzsche, the New Right’s paragon of strength and vitality, practically soyfacing in this degrading photo because a woman who would never love him thought it was funny. Poor bastard.
This was the ultimate failure of Nietzsche’s life. It would be the failure of anyone’s life. We all want to find someone we love who loves us back and build a life with that person. Nietzsche was never able to even take the first step. There’s a story out there (It’s most likely apocryphal but whatever) of Nietzsche attending a dinner party and being seated next to a young woman. He turned to her, and his opening line was “How does it feel to sit next to a man made of glass?” Does this sound like a guy who knew how to talk to women?
I think Nietzsche’s failures with women were fully the result of his temperament. The qualities that made him a great philosopher—his intensity, whirring mind, and ability to drill down and see things from all possible angles—also made him terribly awkward and asocial. He was so different from the people around him that he could never properly integrate with them.
This is where the “Why” comes in. If he was going to be handed this blessing/curse that was his mind, he had better put it to good use. If he was going to be alone, stripped of any and all romantic prospects, he would set his sights on generating ideas that would resonate for centuries. That was the only way out, his chance to justify the despair he had suffered. The quote about “Why” and “How” is his attempt to coach himself up, to convince himself to keep going. He didn’t have anyone else around him to provide this advice, so he had to give it to himself. How profoundly sad.
Unfortunately, things never got better for Nietzsche. At least, not while he was in his right mind. In January of 1889, he suffered from a severe mental breakdown that he never recovered from. The story (also probably apocryphal) is that he encountered a horse on the streets of Turin, Italy that was being brutally whipped by its owner. Witnessing this, he ran over to the horse, threw his arms around it, and fully broke down sobbing. He screamed out “I understand you!” over and over again until his friend had to come get him and take him home. He was never the same after that.
Even if the story isn’t true, I feel like what actually broke him was the dissonance between what he declared in his writing and who he actually was. He had a Split Self, projecting an image to the world that was very different from how he actually felt. The bigger the gap is between these two Selves, the public and the private, the more room pathologies and vices have to enter and take over. And Nietzsche’s gap was gargantuan.
He had been beaten and suffering indignities all of his life, and he couldn’t keep up the facade any more. It became too much of a load to bear, no matter how strong his “Why” was. His journey was complete. He had pushed himself to his absolute limit. This is why he “understood” the horse. He too had been brutally whipped, and could take no more. Think back to that picture with Salomé and Rée.
Once he fully lost his mind and came under the care of his mother and evil sister Elisabeth, he started to gain some notoriety. People wanted to know more about the mad philosopher who claimed that God was dead. Allegedly, Elisabeth would hold salons in her house with Germany’s brightest philosophical minds, discussing Nietzsche’s ideas while the man himself wailed in psychological agony in another room. People have always been suckers for tortured artists.
Nietzsche eventually died in 1900, right at the turn of the century that would ultimately prove him right. Some think his degeneration was the result of an advanced case of syphilis, which he most likely picked up from a prostitute. If true, that would be a fitting end for history’s most famous incel. Not having a girlfriend ultimately killed him.
Despite all of this, of all the ways in which his life did not match his philosophy, I find him to be a very sympathetic figure. His story is one of unimaginable perseverance. Just the physical ailments alone would be enough to stop anyone in their tracks. But Nietzsche suffered through his regular bouts of migraines and vomiting and explosive diarrhea (That’s what people really mean when they say he suffered from “digestive issues”) and still had the discipline to think and write whenever he was physically capable of doing it. And what was his reward for all of that struggle? Nothing, absolutely nothing. Nobody cared about what he wrote. He didn’t make any money. No girls wanted to talk to him. And yet, he kept on going anyway. He wanted so badly (you could even say he needed it at the most basic level) to get his ideas out into the world that the work itself was his motivating force. It’s what got him out of bed every day, on the days when he actually was able to get out of bed.
In his most honest moments, when he wasn’t trying to show everyone how strong he was, Nietzsche used his superior intellect and sensitive soul to tailor his philosophy to alleviate some of the pain he carried. He wasn’t really dynamite; he was just a man trying his absolute hardest to make the best of the cards fate had dealt him. The only way he could do that was by attempting to love the cards.
There were so many reasons for him to give up, so many obstacles in his way, and not one sign of encouragement. Yet he just kept going, all the way until it broke him. I know I couldn’t do it, but he did, and we’re all better off for it. Some might use his philosophy to justify their aggression or selfish actions. That’s fine. We can never fully control how others interpret what we put into the world. I’m just glad I found this man’s story and, I hope, correctly glimpsed the human, all-too-human being who wrote it.
