Life: A Beautiful Mess
“What if some day or night a demon were to steal after you into your loneliest loneliness and say to you: ‘This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh and everything unutterably small or great in your life will have to return to you, all in the same succession and sequence.’ “
Is Life Worth Reliving?
This mind-bending thought experiment comes from the great philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche and his concept of the eternal return. At the heart of it is the disquieting question of whether our lives, as we are living them, are worth living.
In other words, could you love your life so much that you’d embrace its entirety, good, bad, and mundane, knowing it would repeat forever?
Embracing the “What Ifs”
Nietzsche emphasizes the importance of owning our choices and their consequences. He believed embracing the eternal return would be a sign of true self-love and acceptance. It forces us to confront the choices we’ve made, and the paths not taken.
RR Author
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