Nietzsche, Nihilism, Affirming Life

 Trying to catch up on my notes. Things are a bit crazy right now. I cannot find the information, the documents, for pursuing my SSI appeal. Anxious, not depressed, called T2, and certainly not ready to fall back into the despondency of nihilism.

Let me share some from Nihilism – Friedrich Nietzsche’s Warning to The World:

However, Nietzsche thinks that we are always in a process of valuing. It would be virtually unrecognisable as a human form of life for us to exist completely without valuing. His central concern on nihilism is what people take to be valuable. He thinks valuing something is better than not valuing anything. But it is not sufficient to escape nihilism that one values something in a committed way. It also matters what one values. Nihilism consists in an inability to find value and meaning in the higher aspects of this life and world. It empties the world and purpose of human existence....

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 All of Nietzsche’s work has one important theme: life affirmation. This is his main focus....

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 However all these nihilists have something in common. They are people who have become detached from what is most valuable. These higher values come from hard-won achievement and experiences of struggle and striving. Sometimes this causes people to want to escape human existence since it is so difficult, which can take the form of life-negation or even worse, indifference to all of the most important values, even to such things as human excellence, creativity and beauty.

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 We may encounter meaninglessness in our life when faced with the loss of what was most meaningful for us: this can be the death of a loved one, the loss a job, a natural disaster destroying our home, etc. The danger arises when one is so attached that one becomes passively stuck in this state of mind, the end result of which is that life is not worth living, and that it is better to end it. Nietzsche tells us that we must actively fight it and overcome it, which is by no means an easy task.

Yeah, well, there is a lesson I forgot back in 2009.  As I tell myself and my friends, not killing myself has made me care again. The Zoloft helps keep me on an even keel but the fight against nihilism is truly in my writing.

4/28/22