The meaning of life
What is the meaning of life? “My doctrine says: the task is to live in such a way that you must wish to live it again.”
- Nietzsche
Until you learn to live each moment in such a way that, if you were to have to repeat it for eternity, you’d be happy, you will NEVER fulfill your greatest potential. This is the secret sauce to life.
Sadly, most human beings are swayed by every minutia occurring around them. They make stories about life happening TO them rather than THROUGH them and thus, suffer a dystopian groundhog day.
Nietzsche’s eternal recurrence theory is a litmus test for an individual’s ability to affirm life, for radical autonomy.
Offering his idea as a thought experiment, Nietzsche writes:
"What if some day or night a demon were to steal into your loneliest loneliness and say to you: ‘This life as you now live and have lived it you will have to live once again and innumerable times again; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh and everything unspeakably small or great in your life must 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!’”
Nietzsche follows up this picture of endless repetition with a challenge:
”The question in each and every thing, ‘Do you want this again and innumerable times again?’ would lie on your actions as the heaviest weight! Or how well disposed would you have to become to yourself and to life to long for nothing more fervently than for this ultimate eternal confirmation and seal?”
In other words, if you were to discover that every moment of your life, all its joys, all its pains, every rush of excitement and every long day of boredom, was to recur in sequence again and again, was to repeat for eternity — how would you react? Would you be pleased? Would you be crushed? Would it impact how you lived the rest of your life?
Nietzsche suggests that the affirmation of the eternal return is possible only if one is willing and able to become well-adjusted to life and to oneself… The specter of infinite monotony was for Nietzsche the abiding impetus to ASSUME ABSOLUTE RESPONSIBILITY: if one’s choices are to be replayed endlessly, they’d better be the ‘right’ ones (not from a moral or religious standpoint but authentic to us).
… the point of the eternal recurrence is that ONLY BY BEING TRULY AUTHENTIC TO OURSELVES, only by finding, choosing, AND BEING RESPONSIBLE FOR OUR OWN PATHS could we possibly ever affirm or approve of our lives.
What gives YOU meaning? What makes YOU happy? What brings YOU fulfillment? What story do you want to live, over and over and over again?
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P.S., If you could use help with this, hit me up for a session. I specialize in ruthless pragmatism in cultivating a life of deep abiding satisfaction.
