Eternal Recurrence (Nietzsche)

In “Thus Spake Zarathustra”, Nietzsche’s Zarathustra emerges from his mountaintop to share his “mightiest thought” with the people. Zarathustra poses this challenge: imagine living your life, an identical life, over and over and over for all eternity. An eternal recurrence, a never-ending repeat of our experiences, exactly the same each time.

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—even this spider and this moonlight between the trees, and even this moment and I myself. The eternal hourglass of existence is turned upside down again and again, and you with it, speck of dust!’

 Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who spoke thus? Or have you once experienced a tremendous moment when you would have answered him: ‘You are a god and never have I heard anything more divine.’ If this thought gained possession of you, it would change you as you are or perhaps crush you. The question in each and every thing, ‘Do you desire this once more and innumerable times more?’ would lie upon your actions as the greatest weight. Or how well disposed would you have to become to yourself and to life?

Dr. Irvin Yalom, a renowned psychiatrist from Stanford, called this thought exercise a “petite existential shock therapy.” An invitation to increase “your awareness that this life, your only life, should be lived well and fully, accumulating as few regrets as possible.” For Yalom, the purpose of this exercise was obvious: if it fills you with dread, you are not living your life well, and you should ask yourself what regrets do I have? and what can I change now so that in five years this same exercise won’t cause such dismay?

As Nietzsche said, amor fati, love your fate. Or, create the fate that you can love.