How often do you think about the way you think?
How often do you think about the way you feel? Not how you feel in terms of whether you are happy or sad. How often do you think about the emotions you experience in reaction to different things around you?
Do you ever ask yourself if you are a genuinely good person, or at least decent?
I often feel like most people simply assume that they are "good," whatever their definition of the word is.
It was somewhere in my teens that I started wondering for the first time if I was actually a good person. Or rather, I realized that I never even considered the possibility that maybe I was a bad person.
Retelling my years of questioning whether I’m a good or bad person would be too long a story and probably not an interesting one. So this essay is not about this.
It’s about how the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche prevented me from becoming not only a bad person but an absolutely despicable one. And the purpose of me sharing this story is to make the point that you shouldn’t simply assume yourself to be a good or decent person. And that, if you truly believe you are, you shouldn’t take it for granted. You shouldn’t view it as something permanent that doesn’t need any work or practice.
This essay is actually not about Nietzsche. And it is most definitely not about me. My personal experience and this particular idea from Nietzsche that helped me are only here to hopefully make this story more interesting and relatable. This is essentially a love letter to philosophy.
Philosophy, not in the academic sense of "Let’s use big words and complex terms that don’t hold any weight in real life so that we sound smart and feel like we’re above others."
But philosophy as understood by Montaigne.
"Our great and glorious masterpiece is to live properly."
"There is nothing so fine as to play this (human) role well and fittingly... There is nothing so difficult to learn as how to live this life well and naturally."
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