This is Nietzsche’s Most Powerful Rules For Hard Times

His warning to everyone going through hell right now.

Photo by Caleb Fisher on Unsplash

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 my lowest ebb. During this period I wrote The Wanderer and His Shtadow. Without a doubt I was conversant with shadows then.” — Ecce Homo, Friedrich Nietzsche

Stop trying to escape the pain.

It won’t work. Use it.

People will do everything and anything to fix, avoid, numb, or distract themselves. Nietzsche thought pain was unavoidable. And fighting the inevitable drains the one thing you need most. Energy to keep going. “To live is to suffer, to survive is to find some meaning in the suffering,” he once said. Of course, he never said suffering is good. He says you have to find something in it. Stop spending energy trying to escape what can’t be escaped, and put that energy into what can’t be changed. What it’s teaching you. And what it demands from you. Hard times don’t break people.

Purposeless hard times break people.

The one who suffers and understands why they’re still standing becomes a completely different person for their next experience. Find clarity in your pain. See past it to come out better and stronger on the other side. Whatever you are going through right now, let the difficulty in. Sit with it, harvest the wisdom and let it change how you see life. Experiences we can’t control are fixed. You cannot change the past. You can only change your reaction to it. Cursing the rain doesn’t make it stop. Getting an umbrella is the wisest decision you can make to get out. Turn your hard experiences into stepping stones for the next reality you can control.

“Only great pain is the ultimate liberator of the spirit….I doubt that such pain makes us ‘better’; but I know that it makes us more profound,” he wrote. When bad things happen, our first reaction is to fight reality. “Why me?” We wish things were different. But we can’t change that reality. So why not use it? Nietzsche argued that the bitter refusal to accept life as it is was a mental trap.

Nietzsche thought loving your fate was the formula for greatness.

“My formula for greatness in a human being is amor fati: that one wants nothing to be different, not forward, not backward, not in all eternity. Not merely bear what is necessary, still less conceal it… but love it.”

Hard times are your psychological battles. Use them to build mental resilience. The stress of a difficult project builds focus. The pain of isolation builds self-reliance. The pain of failure destroys your fragile ego and replaces it with mental competence.

Build your own rules.

When things go wrong, people look for a saviour. They look to others , gurus, or systems to tell them what to do. Nietzsche warned against this. He called people who blindly follow the crowd “the herd.” The herd wants comfort and safety. But the herd is easily panicked.

“The individual has always had to struggle to keep from being overwhelmed by the tribe. If you try it, you will be lonely often, and sometimes frightened. But no price is too high to pay for the privilege of owning yourself.”

Hard times expose the flaws in general advice. What works for the crowd might ruin you. You must become your own judge and jury. If your industry is going through changes, don’t wait for a boss to pick you up. Build the hard skills to transcend what’s not working for you anymore. Assess your skills, look at the damage, and decide your next move based on reality. True strength is looking at a crisis and deciding your definition of victory. Regardless of what everyone else is doing.

No one crosses the river for you.

Most people wait indefinitely for someone else to figure things out. For the system to sort them out. Or that the right person will appear and know what to do. “No one can construct for you the bridge upon which precisely you must cross the stream of life, no one but you yourself alone,” Nietzsche said. Everyone’s hard time is, to a meaningful degree, their own. The specific crossing required of you is yours alone. What you need to learn from this difficulty, what you need to do, what you need to face, nobody can do that on your behalf.

Find the “why” to endure the “how.”

Pain without a purpose is torture. Pain with a purpose is an experience. Nietzsche thought people can survive almost any physical or emotional hardship if they believe the struggle matters. “He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how,” he said. People training for a marathon don’t dwell on the pain. They have a “why.” Now, if you force someone to run that same distance, the pain is identical, but the psychological experience is different. One is a win; the other is misery.

When you are going through a tough time, immediately define the purpose of your struggle. You are not just enduring a difficult recovery; you are showing your children how to fight. Attach your current pain to a massive, future objective. Suddenly, the burden feels different. In the middle of something difficult, go from how do I get through this to what am I getting through this for? The how will sort itself out if you can find a specific why. Make the decision to stop resisting reality and start working with it. To look at your life, including the painful parts, and say this is mine, and I will keep going. Don’t fight against every difficult experience. And drain yourself against the unchangeable.

Absorb what is.

And keep going. Hard times are easier to bear when you stop treating them as deviations from your life. They are your life. Nietzsche thought you are capable of more than you think. That difficulty is not accidental to a good life but part of what produces it. And that’s how you live through hard times. You don’t grow by avoiding the tough experiences. You grow by going through it. Staying present in it and refusing to let it close you off. For every tough experience, know your why. Claim your life as yours. And do what you must. In the words of philosopher Albert Camus, “Basically, at the very bottom of life, which seduces us all, there is only absurdity, and more absurdity. And maybe that’s what gives us our joy for living, because the only thing that can defeat absurdity is lucidity.”