In every age, the so-called wisest have passed an identical judgment on life: it is worthless. Friederick Nietzsche is known as many things. He is the man who wanted to destroy Christian values and build the Ubermensch in its place, who proclaimed that God is dead and we have killed him, and a philosopher whose thoughts have been misused by some of the greatest monsters in history. But he was also someone who cared deeply about the philosophy of happiness and thought more than almost any other thinker about what made a human truly miserable. And that is just what we will discuss in this video. Whereas the Stoics, Epicureans, and Nietzsche himself all had fantastic thoughts on what made someone joyful and happy, we will instead look at what Nietzsche thought made a person miserable, depressed, and self-destructive. Our primary source for this will be The Gay Science, but we will draw upon Nietzsche's other works when needed. We will learn how fear of power breeds resentment, how other people can plunge us into confusion and despair, and while striving for happiness directly.

makes it impossible to achieve. As always, I encourage you to critically examine each of these ideas to see if they ring true for you and not to take my interpretation of nature at face value. As there is almost certainly a richness in his philosophy that I have missed. But first, are you sitting comfortably? If so, Nietzsche thinks you may have already lost because the first step to misery is one pursuing comfort. Nietzsche's philosophy is full of warnings, but perhaps the most important of them all comes in the form of the last man, a terrifying image of what mankind could become with all of its access to modern comforts and pervasive nihilism. The last man is a creature created after religious values have fallen away, but without anything to take their place. Thus, we would be reduced to our basic desires, seeking comfort and avoiding discomfort with no general orientation in our life. This is why Nietzsche sees in the downfall of Christian values a great opportunity, but also a terrifying prospect that we will all become passive, lazy nihilists. The last man desires comfort in all things.

do not see the point in struggle or striving because they are not creative enough to make their own values, and their will is not strong enough to motivate them to action. They allow their life to pass by without seizing any control over it. They have no Mastery over themselves or the world, and so they drift through existence in a form of gentle despair. Each day is Pleasant because of their endless pursuit of comfort, but in the long run, a gaping hole is left in their life. It is not clear whether nature thinks that one day they will wake up and realize that their whole existence has been for nothing, or whether they will persist in this gentle unhappiness right up to their death. But he is certain on one point: this would be a tragic waste of human potential. N thinks in order to gain access to Great Joys, we must seek great discomforts. This is a theme throughout all of his philosophy, whether it's in the image of Zarathustra descending from Enlightenment to be scorned by the world.

or through the powerful, joyful person strengthening their resolve through continuous pain. Nature thinks that true valuable happiness only comes through the conscious choice to suffer, and his reasoning behind this is twofold. The first reason is pretty straightforward: too much comfort makes us fragile. Nature does not have a rosy view on the world. He knows that suffering is inevitable, and it will be all the more painful if it catches us unawares. The only way to make ourselves strong enough to bear the suffering of life, and even to celebrate it, is to choose the path of suffering ourselves, just as a new piece of music might at first seem unfamiliar and irritating, but over time we grow to love it through familiarity. Nature wants us to learn to appreciate pain through continual exposure. The second reason is a little bit more subtle, but is ultimately very insightful. The more pain we endure, the more it will increase our freedom. After all, in order to do anything worthwhile, we have to be able to bear suffering, whether we want to carve a great empire like Napoleon

create fantastic arts like Gerta, or simply become the master of our own leisure. We are going to have to endure hardship. If happiness was easy, then everyone would do it. For nature, it is only through learning to suffer that we will cultivate the strength to become truly free. For him, how autonomous we are is directly proportional to how much we're willing to endure to attain our wills. And if we cannot stand discomfort, then we won't be very free at all. But why all this emphasis on strength? What purpose is this power going to serve? Well, that brings us nicely onto our next point and the next step on the road to human misery. If you want more on philosophy and the art of learning, subscribe to my email list and my Patreon. The links are in the description. To the fear of power. Nature is often painted as a power-obsessed philosopher, and there is some truth in this. He did think we all had a will to power inside of us that wanted to exert itself on the world and on ourselves. However, n is not

a mere fetishist of power. As some have accused him of being, he thinks that power and strength are important prerequisites to human flourishing. And this is best illustrated by how he thinks people behave when they are powerless. In Ne's view, powerlessness is not a virtue but instead brings out the worst in human nature. And this comes out most of all in his concept of resentment. Resentment is an emotion that we're all familiar with. It is what happens when we see someone more accomplished than us in a field we value, and envy burns inside of us. But the envy is not aspirational but destructive. It does not aim at building us up to their level but tearing them down to ours, so that our resentment is alleviated without having to face the fact that we might be inadequate by our own standards. This is self-evidently an unpleasant emotion to feel, and Ne is hardly the first to point it out. Both early Buddhist thinkers and church fathers saw it as an emotion standing in the way of any

spiritual goal. But nature truly brings to life the poisonous effects of resentment. The reenter lives in a constant state of denial about what they actually want. In truth, they aspire to become the object of their resentment. If I resent a more successful philosophy Channel than mine, then what that tells you is that I desire their position. But if I am powerless, then I don't have the ability to attain that success. Instead, the only route forward is to declare that it's not a position worth having in the first place. We are like the fox in eso's Fable who, when they cannot get their desired grapes, declare that they were probably sour anyway. But this self-trickery cannot truly bring fulfillment because it's a repression of what we actually desire. If we resent something, we cannot strive towards it, even if deep down it is our truest want. And the cruelty of this trick is evident. It turns what could have been a motivation to empower our wills and so achieve our heart's desire into a guarantee that we

will never be fulfilled. What could have been a temporary obstacle instead becomes a permanent amputation of our root to happiness. It also encourages us to hate the object of our resentment and to try and take revenge on a life we feel has wronged us. And according to Nature, we fall into this powerless state because we fear power itself. We associate it with some of the greatest atrocities in history without recognizing that all of the great goods in history also required power. And the power n has in mind is not merely physical but involves a sort of self-overcoming that is difficult to put into work. But it partly involves a refusal to submit your will to that of another. It involves recognizing yourself as the sovereign of your life with all of the crushing pressure and radical freedom that that brings. It means not letting the morality or taste of others dictate what you do, but instead being in full control and taking full responsibility for your life. It is easy for this to be turned into a bit of clickable wisdom, but let's stop for a

moment and consider just how radical this idea of freedom is. According to Nature, the truly free aren't even bound by the rules of morality. We would take full ownership for our decisions and refuse to submit our will to anyone else's. This is a huge change from the way that many of us live our lives and at points n hints that if most people thought this way, it would be an out-and-out disaster. It is an independence of thought, will, and action that is greater than that proposed by almost any other philosopher, and yet it is what n suggests that we begin to do in order to not be eaten up by resentment and weakness. And contrary to popular belief, this form of power eventually becomes benevolent all by itself without the need for external compulsion. As n puts it, the state in which we hurt others is rarely as agreeable as that in which we benefit others. It is a sign that we are still lacking in power, or it shows a sense of frustration in the face of this lack of power. But I want to delve

little more deeply into this theme of independence because if there's one thing that NE considers a Sure Fire roots to despair it is being too influenced by crowds and that is just our next point three hell is other people in jeul sra's play no exit. The character of gasar famously closes the drama by saying Hell is other people and this line has been taken out of context and misinterpreted to paint satra as a profound misanthrope but the truth is a little bit more complicated. Satra was referring at least partly to the human tendency to fear judgment from others and for our self-image to be regulated through the opinions of our peers. N shares this worry and he points out a human tendency that can bring us all great misery dwelling too long in the company of others such that we become alien ated from our own characters or in his words becoming actors playing ourselves. One of the images n turns to repeatedly in his philosophy is that of the herd that is the majority of society.

who he viewed as having roughly speaking the same opinions and outlook on life. But he did not think that people were naturally like this. And said it is in the power of almost anyone to cultivate their individuality and be both more fulfilled and achieve a greater level of self-development and understanding. However, in his view, the herd has an outright violent reaction to anyone attempting to differentiate themselves. Above all, the herd values predictability. And the more similar people are to each other and their past selves, the more predictable they can be. Thus, the herd is a hindrance to anyone attempting to embrace radical freedom and individuation. And it would exert social and physical pressure to rein them back into a narrow way of thinking and living. In and of itself, this sort of social pressure might not necessarily be seen as a bad thing. But nature does not see this as the subject genuinely conquering any drive they have that are unacceptable to the herd. But instead, much like our renter in the previous section, they repress those drives and it

is this repression that causes such unfulfillment and unhappiness. It may even reach the unconscious levels, and we will spend our entire lives searching for an itch that we can neither find nor scratch. In constant dissatisfaction with no clue as to the cause, such a fate awaits us if we give ourselves wholeheartedly to the crowd. It is no wonder that later psychoanalytic thinkers like Freud admired the insight that had into the inner workings of his own mind. However, unlike some monastic thinkers, nature does not think that we should spend our entire lives in solitude either. Arguably, one of the key conflicts within the character of Zarathustra is the tension between his urge to go out and interact with people because of his great love for mankind, and his urge to retreat back into his cave into perfect individuated solitude. I think there is a lesson in here for us all. The issue of how to balance our individuation with our interaction with others is an open question, and it's one that must be constantly re-evaluated.

nature warns us of the possibility that we'll become so embedded in crowds and communities that we will forget ourselves. We will become unfamiliar with our characters and thus lose any awareness of what makes us happy or fulfilled, or even what makes us miserable. We will become emotionally stilted and will trudge around in glassy-eyed dissatisfaction, aware that something is wrong but unable to put our finger on what it is. For nature, this is a sorry state for two reasons: it is unpleasant and unfulfilling, but it's also a complete waste of everything unique and wonderful we could have added to the world. It takes everything about us that would be peculiarly us and crushes it into a mold for the benefit of others. And this is one of the most applicable pieces of wisdom that never wrote. There are few Among Us who don't have to deal with the trials and tribulations of being part of a community. We are social animals and it's difficult to live without the company of others, but nature

reminds us not to forget our own wills. Just because we repress our desires to please others, doesn't mean that they will go away. And if we become unconscious of them, then we can't even gently let them go in the way that Shophow might want us to. We will be stuck in lives peppered with holes, wondering why we are so sad. But next, we will look at a warning that's not often associated with nature, but I think is a key part of his overall philosophy: four excesses in seriousness. Nature is often associated with a very particular type of thinker, especially in his later writings like Twilight of the Idols or The Antichrist. He writes in such a passionate and angry style that he gives the impression that he's a supremely serious man, tormented by what he saw as the philosophical foolishness of the people and society around him. And there is no doubt a little truth in this, though some have argued that his later emotional instability was just evidence

of his syphilis reaching the neurological stage. Nonetheless, in this characterization, we lose the emphasis that n placed on a light-hearted and genial approach to life, and that he saw an excess in seriousness to be a sure sign of a miserable person. In some ways, this is obvious: if someone can't laugh, then chances are they're very sad. But n has a very particular view on what he takes seriousness to be. He sees it as an attitude to life that is fundamentally unplayful and unperceptive, one that regards almost everything as off-limits. In one illuminating passage in The Gay Science, Nietzsche characterizes 19th-century Europeans as weighed down by obsessions over value judgments. We have become completely enraptured with the ideas of Good and Evil, and we regard any action, even a mere act of thinking, as falling into one of these camps, burdening everything with a moral label. According to n, this imbues us with a sort of artificial seriousness. It puts a lot of pressure both on us and our lives to

be a certain way, and this can rob life of its fundamental wonder. It means we get so wrapped up in how things should be that we forget to enjoy the world as it actually exists. This observation by Nietzsche is an extension of many previous thinkers. Both Buddhist philosophers and Stoics have pointed out that our attachment to people and things not in our control will bring us unhappiness in the long term. Nietzsche just extends this thinking to an area of life that we are very attached to: morality. For him, calling something good is clinging to a particular way the world should be. In this way, Nietzsche managed to out-Stoic the Stoics and frame our very moral system as an attachment which weighed down our characters and our thinking, leading us into despair. On the flip side, Nietzsche talks of a joyous thinker who is unburdened by these concerns. They have pushed past traditional definitions of morality and value and can instead dance through life. This is part of Nietzsche's doctrine of Amor Fati or loving one's fate. He says that ideally we should want

nothing to be different forwards or backwards. For all eternity, we should have such strong spirits that we should be able to take joy in whatever life throws at us. But this only works if we unburden ourselves of the judging instinct that we have inherited from older philosophies and develop the power to rejoice at the unpleasant aspects of life. For nature, there is a world of difference between someone who is cheerful because they've never confronted a troubling question and someone who has gone through these questions and discovered a deep love for life on the other side. And this doctrine of Amor fati is what we shall explore next. And in doing so, we will illuminate the ultimate distinction that nature makes between the miserable and the joyous, and that is the difference between saying yes to life and saying no to it. Five Amor fati. If we consider together all of the things that nature thinks are conducive to our pronounced misery, the hatred of discomfort, the fear of power, the disdain for individuation, and the

refusal to unburden yourself of traditional valuations. They all have one thing in common: they are denying some aspect of life, refusing to take joy in it. The hater of suffering says no to suffering and runs away from it, while the person who fears individuation or power does the same to their object of Terror. Finally, the person obsessed with morality refuses to recognize their radical freedom and chains down their possibilities with links forged from Good and Evil. In each case, nature thinks we would be denying some fundamental aspect of life, and in each case, the solution is to embrace that aspect instead. Thus, he replaces our hatred of pain with the active quest to seek it, the fear of Power with the will to power, a disdain for individuation with a love of the idiosyncrasies of the individual, and an obsession with morality with the revaluation of all values and an embrace of radical freedom. In each case where we have the instinct to say no to some part of life, nature seizes us by the

shoulders forces us to look our fear in the face, and to embrace it with love instead. And this is what I take to be the cornerstone of his philosophy of happiness: the ability to say yes to anything in life. This theme is perhaps starkest in his doctrine of the Eternal Recurrence. This is a thought experiment by Nietzsche that asks us to imagine that the arrow of time bends in a circle, and that our lives will be repeated again and again for all eternity. He then asks us for our honest emotional reaction to this situation. Are we filled with fear at having to live life over and over again without an end in sight, or are we filled with joy, loving life so much that we are excited to be reunited with her once again? Nietzsche says that if we take the first attitude, we are at a fundamental level saying no to life. We are spitting in the face of our own existence and engaging in a futile exercise. Whatever we may think about the relative value of our lives, we are immersed in them now, and the only sensible

route forward is to embrace it, love it, and say yes to it. This is explicitly not a rational doctrine. Nature thinks there can be no rational doctrines about the value of life itself because none of us are disinterested parties. It only makes sense to take the outlook on life, life that is most practical and loving. Life is the best option on offer and Amatti demands a lot of our attitude. It compels us to turn every negative experience into a positive one. It suggests that we smile on our pain and love whatever tragedies befall us. It means being thankful that our loved ones have died, that illnesses have been endured, and doing this all not with a gentle or calm heart like a stoic philosopher might, but with passionate joy. It means grasping your suffering and kissing it, wishing to see it over and over again for eternity. It is one of the most radical pieces of wisdom ever wrote and it seems almost impossible to achieve in its perfect form. Nonetheless, he thinks it is an outlook worth striving towards. N is again pushing ancient wisdom to its

extreme here whereas a Buddhist or a stoic might encourage us to be indifferent to the sufferings of Life n asks why we should stop at indifference if we can train our attitudes in this way. Why not train them to actively love everything awful that's happened to us. I will leave it up to you to decide how realistic a prospect this is. And lastly, I want to give two caveats to all of this advice that are worth taking on board. The first is that n is notorious for his advice only being aimed at a very particular kind of person. Whereas stoicism pitches itself as a philosophy for everyone, slaves and Emperors, nature explicitly writes for a very particular sort of temperament, one that will only be satisfied draining every last drop from life, one that naturally seeks to plunge itself into hardship and grief to toughen up its mind. For others, a different route to happiness might be best recommended. In Nature's own words, in one person, the health of their soul could look like its opposite. In another person, the kind of Joy n promises is on

the other side of an awful lot of pain. According to him, it is pain that we will learn to love, but we should surely be very careful before attempting to follow this path through life. For those who do not desire this extreme pain and extreme joy, n suggests that more moderate paths like the stoic or epicurean one might be preferable. And the other caveat is a short recommendation about how to use n's advice in a practical way. It's worth bearing in mind that n often writes from a deep place of frustration, especially in his later works. He comes across as almost angry at the gaps philosophy has left, at how it has ignored other paths to joy by only promoting ones where we renounce our desires and live aesthetic lives. To that extent, we may want to take the extremes of n's philosophy with a pinch of salt. In this video, perhaps more than any other, I encourage you to think critically about what aspects of n's philosophy are truly applicable to you and which you do not want to take on.

board. There was also the matter that n himself was a deeply unhappy man, and perhaps that's relevant if we're going to look at his advice on how to live a happy life. But if you want more controversial Philosophy from n, check out this video on his analysis of our moral system and how he thinks it's not fit for purpose. And stick around for more on thinking to improve your life.

Nietzsche's Guide to Destroying your Life | The Last Man

Nietzsche's Guide to Destroying your Life | The Last Man