You look at these words from your screen in an era so fast-paced you can hardly comprehend it. So many responsibilities, so many things to take up your attention, we over consume, we aren’t productive enough, but we’ve also come so far as a society. In which case, bet you didn’t think some old fuddy-duddy from the 19th century who wrote depressingly in his journal has anything to do with you and your daily life. You can probably guess though that I’m about to tell you why Freidrich Nietzsche in particular does. He has a very famous reputation for being a nihilist, and if you know a smidgen more, that he’s a Deist. “God is dead” he said, so he must be a bore at parties.
That simply isn’t true. Nietzsche’s work breathes with the belief that life is worth living and you must overcome the devastation of it to make something for yourself. It is so life affirming the syrupy sappiness chokes you. One of these life-affirming concepts lies within Eternal Recurrence. There are other components that make up the whole picture, but I’ll make it simple by just mentioning the main idea.
Imagine a demon visited you in the night and whispered that this life you’ve lived you’ve already lived an infinite number of times and will only repeat another infinite number of times. Gosh, that sounds pretty awful doesn’t it. As stated in an article by Melanie Shepherd “…the idea of an eternally recurring life is presented as a way of gauging how well-disposed one is to oneself and to life.” If it sounds awful, then I suppose that says something about how you feel about your experiences thus far. It’s normal. It’s not supposed to be simple to accept. What if you really had to live everything exactly the way it was over and over again, you’d go crazy. Not all your memories are good ones. The only way to cope would be to overcome and accept it and learn how to be happy.
The setting is fictional, but that doesn’t matter because the principle stays the same. Nietzsche believes that living is exhausting and painful, but that the worst parts of our lives make living all the more worth it because it only emphasizes the best moments of our lives. “…a positive response to life must embrace and integrate every experience, joyful and sorrowful, proud and shameful, loving and hateful, for, Nietzsche argues, one can only accept a particular experience if one accepts that all of the events and experiences of one’s life have directly or indirectly led to this moment” is explained in the Journal of Humanistic Psychology to support that it’s not being happy despite everything that has gone wrong, but to include that too. The extent to which Nietzsche believes life is a tragedy needs to be stressed. That it is truly a wretched, wretched experience, but that only makes it all the more significant that we find our reason to live.
Phillip K. Jain writes that a person may think wholeheartedly that they are happy, but then the threat of eternal recurrence puts that into question; “Live it over again with nothing new? It is the “nothing new” that does it. This is how we make it through our existing life.” I’m not saying to become comfortable with relaxing in with Netflix every home because it’s what’s familiar and what you like, but I am saying Nietzsche’s purpose is to put everything into perspective on how satisfied with our life we really are.
You who are living day to day, why do you do it? Just because you’re alive? I can’t take that partial answer. You live because you want to be happy. But you get caught up in your head with this idea of happiness–always the concept of happiness. That in 15 years once you have a stable income, a family and plenty of friends, and lots of free time to do whatever you want to do you’ll truly have reached the epitome of happiness. But this is all wrong. It’s not a condition to fill, it’s what the you of today feels about the life you’ve lived until now. You have to want your experiences. Everything. You’ll wake up one day with all these requirements checked and wonder why you don’t feel much different from before, because life won’t have truly changed. And you’re still you.