Hiking with Nietzsche: On Becoming Who You Are

by John Kaag

Being a responsible adult is, among other things, often to resign oneself to a life that falls radically short of the expectations and potentialities that one had or, indeed, still has. It is to become what one has always hoped to avoid.

“every evil to which we do not succumb is a benefactor.”

Life was no longer lived enthusiastically—only deferred.

The point of historical study was to enrich the present moment of experience.

Aesthetic experience could justify human existence but could also, just as easily, invalidate it. The mass production and consumption of art could be used to distract, mask, or blind an audience.

It is, indeed, the most personal of answers—the one that always determines an individual choice. Of course you can choose anything you want, to raise children or get married, but don’t pretend to do it because these things have some sort of intrinsic value—they don’t. Do it solely because you chose them and are willing to own up to them. In the story of our lives, these choices are ours and ours alone, and this is what gives things, all things, value. Only when one realizes this is he or she prepared to face the eternal recurrence, the entire cycle, without the risk of being crushed.

The ruler is deemed “a jerk” when slave morality makes him accountable, makes him guilty—for his strength, that is—makes him blameworthy for not humbling himself or feigning weakness.

When one’s life is completely controlled by powerful masters, the discipline of self-denial gives a slave something to do on his own terms.

What are the possibilities for human existence in an age that seems intent on destroying itself? What retards its power and limits its reach? What hastens decadence? How can a culture or a person overcome the decline that appears almost destined to occur?

Culture—entertainment, consumerism, the arts—doesn’t seem like the sort of thing that can imprison a people. This intuition, however, Adorno argues, is precisely the thought that lowers one’s defenses. Popular culture shapes a people’s preferences, delimiting the scope of human activity and desire. Our consumer culture might give us choices, might give us the semblance of being free to choose, but this liberty amounts to pitifully little if everyone is given the same circumscribed options.

One way of retreating from pop culture is to embrace unabashed elitism.

Quiet: the one thing the herd cannot abide. Silence, the sound of oneself, enables—even necessitates—thinking.

Decline was inevitable, but how one went out was decidedly not.

beneath the reasonable habits of our lives hides a little inexplicable something that has the ability to opt out, even against our better judgment.

The enduring nature of being human is to turn into something else, which should not be confused with going somewhere else.

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