Everything Is F*cked(37)

Amor fati, for Nietzsche, meant the unconditional acceptance of all life and experience: the highs and the lows, the meaning and the meaninglessness. It meant loving one’s pain, embracing one’s suffering. It meant closing the separation between one’s desires and reality not by striving for more desires, but by simply desiring reality.

It basically meant: hope for nothing. Hope for what already is—because hope is ultimately empty. Anything your mind can conceptualize is fundamentally flawed and limited and therefore damaging if worshipped unconditionally. Don’t hope for more happiness. Don’t hope for less suffering. Don’t hope to improve your character. Don’t hope to eliminate your flaws.

Hope for this. Hope for the infinite opportunity and oppression present in every single moment. Hope for the suffering that comes with freedom. For the pain that comes from happiness. For the wisdom that comes from ignorance. For the power that comes from surrender.

And then act despite it.

This is our challenge, our calling: To act without hope. To not hope for better. To be better. In this moment and the next. And the next. And the next.

Everything is fucked. And hope is both the cause and the effect of that fuckedness.

This is hard to swallow, because weaning ourselves off the sweet nectar of hope is like pulling a bottle away from a drunk. Without it, we believe we’ll fall back into the void and be swallowed by the abyss. The Uncomfortable Truth frightens us, and so we spin stories and values and narratives and myths and legends about ourselves and the world to keep that truth at bay.

But the only thing that frees us is that truth: You and I and everyone we know will die, and little to nothing that we do will ever matter on a cosmic scale. And while some people fear that this truth will liberate them from all responsibility, that they’ll go snort an eight ball of cocaine and play in traffic, the reality is that this truth scares them because it liberates them to responsibility. It means that there’s no reason to not love ourselves and one another. That there’s no reason to not treat ourselves and our planet with respect. That there’s no reason to not live every moment of our lives as though it were to be lived in eternal recurrence.21

The second half of this book is an attempt to understand what a life without hope might look like. The first thing I’ll say is that it’s not as bad as you think. In fact, I believe it is better than the alternative.

The second half of this book is also an honest look at the modern world and everything that is fucked with it. It’s an evaluation done in the hope not of fixing it, but of coming to love it.

Because we must break out of our cycle of religious conflict. We must emerge from our ideological cocoons. We must let the Feeling Brain feel, but deny it the stories of meaning and value that it so desperately craves. We must stretch beyond our conception of good and evil. We must learn to love what is.


Amor Fati

It was Meta’s last day in Sils Maria, Switzerland, and she planned to spend as much of it as she could outdoors.

Friedrich’s favorite walk was around the east bank of Lake Silvaplana, half a kilometer from town. The lake was a shimmering, crystalline thing this time of year, wreathed by the mountains on a horizon pulverized by white peaks. It was on walks around this lake that he and Meta had first bonded four summers ago. This was how she wanted to spend her last day with him. This was how she wanted to remember him.

They left shortly after breakfast. The sun was perfect, and the air was silky. She led, and he hobbled along behind her with his walking stick. They passed barns and fields of cattle and a small sugar beet farm. Friedrich joked that the cows would be his most intellectual companions once Meta left. The two laughed and sang and picked walnuts as they went.

They stopped and ate around noon, beneath a larch tree. It was then that Meta began to worry. They had come far in their excitement. Much farther than she had anticipated. And now she could see that Friedrich was struggling, both physically and mentally, to keep it together.

The walk back was arduous for him. He dragged noticeably now. And the reality of her leaving the next morning fell over them like an ominous moon, a pall upon their words.

He had grown grumpy, and achy. The stops were frequent. And he began muttering to himself.

Not like this, Meta thought. She didn’t want to leave him like this, but she must.

It was late afternoon by the time they approached the village. The sun was waning, and the air was now a burden. Friedrich lagged by a good twenty meters, yet Meta knew the only way to get him all the way home was by not stopping for him.

They passed the same sugar beet farm, the same barn and the same cattle, his new companions.

“What was that?” Friedrich shouted. “Where has God gone, you say?”

Meta turned around and knew what she would find before she even saw it: Friedrich, walking stick waving in the air, shouting maniacally at a small group of cows chewing in front of him.

“I shall tell you,” he said, breathing heavily. He raised his stick and gestured to the mountains around. “We have killed him—you and I! We are his murderers. But how have we done this?”

The cows chewed placidly. One swatted a fly with its tail.

“How were we able to drink up the seas? Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the horizon? What did we do when we unchained the earth from its sun? Are we not perpetually falling in all directions? Are we not straying as though through some Infinite nothing?”22