Nietzsche's Rehab: Brief Habits
On automatons and experimentation (and Siberia)
Note: I’ll strive to start every month with a post based on Nietzsche’s writing. Time will tell how long that would last 😌 Regardless, I hope these posts will make someone reconsider FN’s image in their mind✨
Again, from Book Four of The Gay Science:
295. Brief habits.— I love brief habits and consider them an inestimable means for getting to know many things and states, down to the bottom of their sweetness and bitterness. My nature is designed entirely for brief habits, even in the needs of my physical health and altogether as far as I can see at all—from the lowest to the highest. I always believe that here is something that will give me lasting satisfaction—brief habits, too, have this faith of passion, this faith in eternity—and that I am to be envied for having found and recognized it; and now it nourishes me at noon and in the evening and spreads a deep contentment all around itself and deep into me so that I desire nothing else, without having any need for comparisons, contempt, or hatred. But one day its time is up; the good things part from me, not as something that has come to nauseate me but peacefully and sated with me as I am with it—as if we had reason to be grateful to each other as we shook hands to say farewell. Even then something new is waiting at the door, along with my faith—this indestructible fool and sage!—that this new discovery will be just right, and that this will be the last time. That is what happens to me with dishes, ideas, human beings, cities, poems, music, doctrines, ways of arranging the day, and life styles.
Enduring habits I hate. I feel as if a tyrant had come near me and as if the air I breathe had thickened when events take such a turn that it appears that they will inevitably give rise to enduring habits; for example, owing to an official position, constant association with the same people a permanent domicile, or unique good health. Yes, at the very bottom of my soul I feel grateful to all my misery and bouts of sickness and everything about me that is imperfect, because this sort of thing leaves me with a hundred backdoors through which I can escape from enduring habits.
Most intolerable, to be sure, and the terrible par excellence would be for me a life entirely devoid of habits, a life that would demand perpetual improvisation. That would be my exile and my Siberia.*
[* Walter Kaufman’s note: “This conclusion qualifies the resolve to live dangerously. But some stability and temporary equilibrium are needed to permit the concentration of all mental and emotional resources on the most important problems. One simply cannot question everything at once. The most one can do is to grant nothing permanent immunity.“]
I’m weirdly biased towards that Nietzsche that is about you living your everyday life. He is my most favourite self-help author because he brings so much poetry and philosophy (as in “love of wisdom“) to it that you cannot help but feel actually human and not an automaton that all those 7 Habits of Rich People that Make Friends books typically make of us.
A year ago a friend shared with me a, well, pirated course whose aim was to improve one’s life but to me it felt highly rigid and monkish. Early rises, meditations, clean eating, practically zero internet, the usual things. All of it naturally based on science. And listen, I’m not here to propagate bingeing on fast food and Netflix, I’m myself not that person and I am myself trying to clear my life (and brain) of stuff, but I’d rather take Nietzsche’s approach to it.
For one thing, my problem with the aforementioned course and its kin is that rigidity, which is presumably based on the science of how our brain actually strives on structure. Which it sure does, but not that far! I asked my friend: what about times when, you know, life happens? There’s a demanding work project, or I get sick, or I just pick up a hobby that messes it all up? Apparently, I must get back on track ASAP. Well, good luck to being a parent, I guess.
Which is exactly what I mean by the source feeling monkish. That’s one of the points made in a wonderfully human book Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals, which correctly remarks how isolating all such life-improving methods typically are. To become a real master of your time you inevitably have to cut off ties with people (or they will cut off ties with the New You, a.k.a. A Jerk). Hell might be other people but so is life—other people. And random events and things.
And so here I side with my buddy Friedrich who is acknowledging the simple, but apparently hard to grasp in our culture, truth that things come and go. And oftentimes the splitting is quite amicable. Say, you moved to a new place and the closest shop just doesn’t run the type of yoghurt or muesli you preferred for breakfast, and you come up with an even better breakfast. Or, even better, without any external change to your life you just realize that something stopped working for you and move on from it.
A few years back I switched to a capsule coffee machine from my moka pot for some reason, but recently I switched back because this way I’d have a larger variety of taste, use less plastic and just save money. Do I regret those few years of the coffee machine use? Absolutely not. It worked then. It stopped (for now?). Although it still comes in handy occasionally, so our relationship isn’t downright severed.
That’s the thing I finally realized not just with my head but with my whole being only last year: nothing in my life has to be set in stone. Of course, I want to continue growing. But that’s about all I can say with 100% certainty. Regarding all else I finally embraced the way of experimentation. I have a few things in my life I must do (work, housekeeping, such stuff) and a few I’d like to do (reading, learning German, taking self defense classes, watching new movies, etc.). Now the question is, how do I go about it exactly. That’s where the need for structure naturally comes in, otherwise the brain cannot possibly focus. And so, as I had done a thousand times before, I’d put together a schedule.
Only this time, I take it as majorly tentative.
I’d throw things in an out. Something almost immediately. Something a few weeks in.
Something doesn’t work at all. Do I mind? Not at all. I just take it as a puzzle to put together, to see, why exactly it isn’t working. And even if I do come to a conclusion on that, it doesn’t mean that I’ll recalibrate it. I might as well drop it till better times: sometimes you have to just accept you can’t cover everything at once. That’s also a major point in that Four Thousand Weeks book: you will never finish all your tasks, you will never cross out the entirety of your bucket list. So chill. Focus on what matters the most. That’s where another Nietzsche’s adage comes in handy: by going we forego.
So, with light heart I dropped drawing for this year to make way for German. I’d have enough time to pick it up again — it is a very convenient hobby — whereas right now there was a handful of circumstances that made going back to German fit really well. I’d still sketch on occasion but I’m not going to waste my energy kicking myself for not sketching often enough, even though, as FN writes, a few years back I thought that this is it! This is the new me! This is forever!
I was mistaken but that realization should make those habits even dearer, I think. It makes your connection more immediate. It pulls you into the here and now, the place where all philosophies worth their salt keep telling you is the best.
Would you consider yourself an experimenter? Or are you actually comfortable within the rigid structures of long-standing habits of all kind (my boyfriend definitely belongs to this group)? Do you have anxiety around not sticking to your desired habits and regimes maybe? Or are you quite easy about it, as in, if you stick to them 80% of the time, you’re fine?
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Thank you for getting that far and cheers!