Human, All Too Human

Reflection

I’d been teetering around reading philosophy books for ages, and had many instances where I picked them up and put them down. I’d instead opted to absorb them by osmosis from fantasy and sci-fi, drawing parallels on my own. If I remember correctly (and assume correctly that the Art of War and some programming books aren’t classified as philosophy), this is the first philosophy book I actually finished completely.

Previously, I’d believed Nietzsche to be a nihilist, but after reading the book, I’ve made the discovery that he was offering a solution. Perhaps not a solution that most people would like, and maybe he phrased his words a bit too strongly, but I can see how he is considered one of the greatest philosophers and his words are quoted everywhere; even if in the wrong spirit.

While the commodization of knowledge and the micro-snippets of ideas propagated by social media don’t fully capture his words —words my review most likely will not either— it reminded me that my search for a goal was misguided. It reminded me that the goal wasn’t to be someone that society looks up to, but to dance to my own beat.

It took me some time to finish reading it, roughly 4 months or so of pecking at a couple pages at a time and ruminating on them in the background of my mind; and I think I’ve become a more cheerful person. Well, cheerful mightn’t be the right word, but a less depressed one. Whether the book caused it, contributed to it or I changed in spite of it, I don’t know, but it gave me things to think about: it made me more inquisitive. If there are morals and beliefs, it made me dive into the ‘why’ more than the ‘what’.

Unironically, it also helped me become more pragmatic about businesses and the general hustle. It wasn’t caused directly by it, but as a byproduct of the knowledge.

I am a self-proclaimed ambitious person, albeit a lazy one, so what it ended up doing was dispel my doubts about the meaning of life —the existential crisis spurred by my mandatory 2 years of service in a corporate company that often leads to burnout for people my age— and with a lot of my brainpower freed up from the fruitless task of querying a database for answers that aren’t there, I decided to actually start inserting data into it; but more importantly, look for the data I should.

Maybe I shouldn’t have rolled my eyes when people told me to read philosophy books and started on it earlier, but maybe it just caught me at a very impressionable period of my life and made as big an impact as it did.