This One Idea Changed How I See Time

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You’ve probably heard the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche’s refrain ‘God is dead’, but have you heard of Nietzsche’s more interesting thought experiment called ‘Eternal recurrence’ that gives meaning to the past and the future? If you’re in a crisis of meaning let’s go to Germany and rewind the clock uhh a safe 150 years and look at Nietzsche’s best concept.

Eternal recurrence is the idea that the world is recurring and arranging a finite number of times and everything we have experienced will happen again and has likely already happened. In other words, our life that we are living has happened, will happen and is continuing to happen.

We’ve been here before... But why?

Well, in a world with finite arrangements which are extrapolated across an infinite time frame, everything we experience must have already happened and will happen again! In this sense, Nietzsche is presenting the universe in a light which would resemble a type of program, which has a limited range of commands at its disposal and will eventually, with the law of infinity on its side, input the same commands and be destined to repeat itself as I’m sure to do in this video.

On the surface, it would seem a pretty bleak and nihilistic view as, if our pain and experiences have already happened in some way or another and it’s our fate to repeat the mistakes of past civilisations, then what’s the point? Where’s the meaning?

Well, unlike a lot of philosophical conclusions, it’s actually a good thing. Nietzsche is asking us to affirm the past; in other words, say yes to ‘wanting it to happen and to happen again’. He wants us to embrace everything; a concept known as ‘amor fati’ translating as ‘to love fate’. This is similar to Albert Camus’ ‘imagine that Sisyphus is happy’ carrying the boulder up the mountain despite the fact he will never reach the top.

If life is tied to fate why do anything?

Fate often gets a bad reputation because it feels like it cancels out free will—if everything’s already decided, what’s the point of making choices? But this is where Nietzsche’s phrase “God is dead” takes on a deeper meaning. By the time he was writing, faith in a living, active God had already started to fade, and that’s even more true today. Even Kierkegaard, who was a Christian philosopher, saw this happening. He criticised what he called “Bourgeois Christianity,” which had become comfortable and hollow—avoiding hard questions like fate and meaning. In earlier times, this wasn’t such a problem, but as science and society developed, old ideas about fate started to lose their grounding.

Nietzsche saw this gap and introduced the idea of eternal recurrence as a way to re-anchor our lives in a world where God no longer guides us. He didn’t want us to spiral into nihilism with no values and accepting that “God is dead” means confronting what that loss really means—our values no longer have the safety net they once did.

Nietzsche warns that if we ignore this and drift through life seeking only comfort, we become what he called “the last man”—someone who avoids struggle and just wants easy pleasure, a passionless person. Through eternal recurrence and amor fati, Nietzsche instead encourages us to embrace everything that happens, even pain, and to live as if we would happily relive our lives exactly the same way again.

It now becomes clear what he means by affirming the past and it can re-affirmed again with an analogy of the past as a stone which we have to drag around with us (remember Sisyphus carrying the boulder). The past then is something we shouldn’t avoid and if we do as Nietzsche says and ‘will it to happen’ again and again, then it will allow us to take a hold of the urgency of our lives as, if we have already reacted to it, then we will feel confident with how to handle pain in the future. To put it another way, when you adopt the thought of eternal recurrence, you are willing backwards and from this thought, you can control your past. This causes time to resemble a circle where the past and the future blend together as, what is to come has already happened and vice versa, so that should bring some comfort.

Ok let me be honest with you, the next section is pretty bleak so if you want to check out after the last comforting sentence I don’t blame you.

Does this mean we’re set up to repeat the mistakes of the past?

If the past has already happened, a worrying realisation creeps in. Are we doomed to repeat the mistakes of ancient civilisations before us? Is rapid growth a precursor to inevitable collapse?

The Mushroom Guru Terence McKenna had a similar thought. He says, as the world is constantly evolving and accelerating with the systems getting more and more intricate, if you were to extrapolate and fast forward a few hundred years, we would end up in an unrecognisable world, moving at an unimaginably fast rate beyond our present comprehension. So maybe that future doesn’t exist because we’re not meant to handle that speed of living. Not the cheeriest thought to have at 1am in bed but that’s an unwarranted window into my brain

Anyway, although the jury’s out on whether the future will repeat the past or not we should still heed Nietzsche’s positive framing for the present. We must embrace the moments in our blip of time we take up and take it all in, instead of watching it go by searching for instant gratification. Through his thought experiment, Nietzsche gives meaning to the past, teaching us not to shy away at the face of pain and risk and instead accept the truth of ‘amor fati’.

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Thanks for reading,

Brandon

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