What Nietzsche Means Today

The German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) only seems to get more relevant and popular as the years go by. Why is this?

It isn’t necessarily because of his ideas. His ideas are too complex for the amount of popularity he has, and he is usually misunderstood. Most people who are inspired by Nietzsche and use his name a lot don’t know much about his actual ideas.

I think his relevance is more about his life itself. But this is strange too, because he didn’t really have much of a life—he was always just alone with his thoughts, living in furnished rooms in hotels, shuffling around from city to city, surrounded by people but radically removed from them.

He traveled a lot, but he didn’t experience much or leave much of a footprint. He traveled to try to disappear—to search for a place where he could be at peace. He lived, as much as possible, like a ghost. And isn’t that how people live today? People seem more like ghosts now than human beings—this had already started during the 2010s when everyone became a slave to their phones, but after the enforced isolation of Covid, it really went to a new level.

Nietzsche’s ideas were far ahead of their time—his work anticipated almost every major 20th century philosophical movement, from postmodernism, to existentialism, to phenomenology, and on and on. But more importantly, his life anticipated what life would become for so many in the technological era—an endless endurance test of shuffling around from rented room to rented room, living in solitude even in densely populated areas, being connected to the world through technology but still existing in a profound silence.

Nietzsche poured his spirit into his creative work with more energy than anyone ever has, but he received next to no feedback during his life. Europe at the time was as connected as it had ever been—telegrams, newspapers, printing presses, all at their peak. It wasn’t like Nietzsche was doing this thousands of years ago when everyone was isolated—the world was more alive and buzzing than ever, but he still couldn’t break through. This, of course, is what life is like for the countless young “content creators” in digital space today.

But in the late 19th century, people were reading more than they ever had, and were always hungry for the next literary genius. People were literate back then, unlike today, when nobody has any attention left. Yet even in that climate, Nietzsche lived undiscovered, producing classic book after classic book—fourteen in all—in a short number of years. Nobody cared.

He would often send his acquaintances—people he knew from his university days and from the couple of years he spent teaching—copies of his books. They would respond with letters saying thank you but making it clear that they didn’t really get what his books were about. Even the few people who were close to him were largely indifferent to his work. Though his work has proven to be so universal—every creative field has been reshaped by him—he was extremely isolated.

Universality and isolation are, it turns out, two sides of the same coin. Nothing is more universal than isolation. Is anything so terrifying as this? Yet this is also a comforting thought—that even in the most extreme isolation, everyone is right there with you, because nothing is more universal than being alone.

Nietzsche would often go days without saying anything out loud other than a few pleasantries to the people at the dining room at whatever hotel he was staying at. His voice itself became weirdly noiseless. Even when he spoke it sounded like silence, according to people who knew him. He would take long walks, but always by himself. Then he would return to his rented room, with a shabby desk and a narrow bed.

What’s remarkable is that his books are so alive—and so funny!—despite how utterly miserable his life was. In some of his later books a certain bitterness pops up here and there, but by and large there is a lightness of tone and an excited style that seems totally at odds with how he lived.

He was only really alive when he was writing, but even that was torture, because his eyes were so damaged. And writing was a curse to him because once he started his brain up, it wouldn’t stop. To be able to sleep, he had to take concoctions—chloral hydrate and so on—and that would knock him out for a few hours.

But all these poisons would wreak havoc on his stomach—and his stomach pains would make him miserable for days on end. Walking was his only joy in life, but when his stomach was upset, he couldn’t even do that.

He was constantly caught in this trap, of having to think to be able to write, but once he started thinking, he couldn’t sleep—so he needed poisons to put him to sleep, which would make him sick. This cycle never ended—and on top of all of this, he had to endure it all totally alone. All while creating the greatest literature anyone has ever done—and having nobody care or notice.

In all of this—loneliness, manic creativity that nobody cares about, a constant loop of self-medication to survive, only talking out loud to exchange superficial pleasantries—so many young people see themselves today. This is the world that modern technology was creating, and it has accelerated greatly in the last twenty years. Especially during the 2010s, when smartphones, social media, and apps left young people more isolated than ever—and this all compounded exponentially in the Covid lockdown years.

Nietzsche fully lived this but he also was still firmly connected to the old world before this hellish existence became inescapable. Young people today only know this hellishness—but Nietzsche, a 19th century man who was spiritually close to the classical world of ancient Greece and Rome, who knew what the cultural heights of humanity once were and could be again—points to something beyond it.

This is ultimately what is important about Nietzsche—that he is both fully part of the special misery of modern life, but points beyond it in a way that young people today can’t imagine. Nietzsche is one of them but also can authentically point to something beyond the hell that they live with every day.

Rates of anxiety, depression, suicide, addiction, and on and on are higher than ever among young people. They are all being forced to face the horrors of the modern world that Nietzsche dealt with. His legacy is that he faced all of this head on, but still found so much beauty in the world, and he would let nothing stop him from expressing all of that beauty.

I think this is why he was able to write with such style—that he was obsessed with finding beauty in such an ugly world, but he needed new language to be able to express it, because the language of the modern world was so shabby and bad. He needed a new style for the new type of beauty he was discovering.

This is why Nietzsche touches so many still today, and will continue to. More than any of the ideas in his books, it is this spirit, this style, which plunged to the depths of modern life, and is his real gift to us. He shows us that even in scraping the absolute bottom of modern life, it is possible to create beauty—not just possible, but necessary, to survive it.