What should you do with your life? It might sound like an overwhelming question, but one of the most influential thinkers of modern times, Friedrich Nietzsche, saw such ruminations as of vital importance. What is important to you? What matters? What makes for a good and meaningful life? What do you prioritise, and why? These values are acted out in the choices you make – they underpin your aspirations, goals and actions.
It’s during the moment when you feel restless and discontent that Nietzsche implores you to get up close to this feeling and to study it. He regards any form of questioning as a sign of good mental health. When you stop one day and say, “What am I doing with my life? Is this a good way to live? How could I be doing things better?” then you are beginning to ask the right questions.
But if flourishing is not prescriptive, if it can’t be put in a box, or jotted down in list form, then it is indeed an individual journey. Nietzsche was one to stress this point. ‘At bottom every man knows that he is a unique being, the like of which can appear only once on this earth. By no extraordinary chance will such a marvellous piece of diversity in unity, as he is, ever be put together a second time. He knows this, but hides it like a guilty secret. Why?’ Nietzsche thinks the reason we shy from the glory of our unique selves is out of fear of others’ opinions, so we think and act with the herd and do not seek our own joy. And while some may act this out due to shyness, mostly we do it out of laziness. We are too lazy to explore our exceptional uniqueness, to discover what it is that we, each of us a ‘unique being’,