Hiking with Nietzsche: On Becoming Who You Are

by John Kaag

Set for yourself goals, high and noble goals, and perish in pursuit of them!

When he left Bonn for Leipzig after only ten months, it was with the distinct sense that being normal was a waste of time.

“Unless suffering is the direct and immediate object of life, our existence must entirely fail of its aim.

I smiled for the camera. A grinning domesticated animal. By the time we reached the bottom, the picture would have been posted to Facebook and “liked” dozens of times. I’d be expected to “like” the “likes,” and the friendship of sheep would continue unabated. I held Becca close and tried my best not to think about the picture.

This exercise was a way of taking hold of sadness, controlling if not quelling it. I’d done it for many years.

Carol remains as Nietzsche often describes himself to his readers: a guide rail next to a torrent, but never a crutch.

Perhaps the failed pilgrim wants nothing more than a bit of tenderness, an immediate, simple sense that the world isn’t completely and utterly hopeless.

“I am no man. I am dynamite”—

How can one love in the right way while being so quietly dissatisfied with life?

The attempt to be free, to retrace a path that I’d taken in my youth, had been cut short by my family obligations, and the journey had slowly morphed into a holiday taken in honor of Nietzsche’s memory rather than anything genuinely, authentically Nietzschean.

“words do not express thoughts very well. They always become a little different immediately after they are expressed. A little distorted. A little foolish.”

What one is, essentially, is this active transformation, nothing more, nothing less.

Modern life, however, is not entirely amenable to becoming who one is; it is designed to distract and deaden in all the ways that Nietzsche suggests.