For Nietzsche, this process, which he would term self-overcoming, is fundamental to answering and resolving the problem of meaning and value in life. So long as one establishes one’s goals of growth in the name of what one deems to be an idealized, life-affirming version of themselves, the process transmutes the suffering of life into something worthwhile and personally redeemable—a sort of alchemy of the spirit that affirms life in the face of its inevitable suffering. “If we have our own why in life, we shall get along with almost any how,” Nietzsche wrote.
