Member-only story
This is Nietzsche’s Most Powerful Rules For Hard Times
His warning to everyone going through hell right now.
He lived through hell. But he didn’t dwell on them. In fact, the controversial philosopher of all time, Friedrich Nietzsche, obsessively focused on how you can conquer reality. In hard times. Or when life falls apart, you need rules that work in the dark. Nietzsche wrote much of his work in physical agony. He suffered from severe headaches, eye and stomach problems. “Every two or three months, I spend about thirty-six hours in bed,” he said. Over the years, especially in adult life, chronic pain took a toll on his life. He sat in small rooms, mostly alone, producing some of the best ideas in western philosophy. He lived the hard life. “There will always be rocks in the road ahead of us. They will be stumbling blocks or stepping stones; it all depends on how you use them,” Nietzsche said.
“In the same year that [my father’s] life declined mine also declined : in my six-and-thirtieth year I reached the lowest point in my vitality, I still lived, but my eyes could distinguish nothing that lay three paces away from me. At that time — it was the year 1879 — I resigned my professorship at Bale, lived through the summer like a shadow in St. Moritz, and spent the following winter, the most sunless of my life, like a shadow in Naumburg. This was…
