To Frolic, Anyway

Fröhliche (German): cheerful, happy, merry, or joyful. As in, Die fröhliche Wissenschaft (The Gay Science)

Written largely on October 15th - happy birthday!

A Will to ‘Power’

Why do we truly do the things we do? For others to approve of us? To put something out into the world in hopes of gaining wealth, power, and influence? To ‘truly’ help others? When you abstract all of these ideas out to the grand scale of the world, it all seems rather arbitrary. Many ambitious people want to conquer the world and become a new world leader. I consider myself and my friends rather well educated in the world, yet we cannot name more than five Roman Emperors when asked - despite dozens of those men ruling the most powerful empire at the time as their unequivocal leader.

Vanity of vanities, saith the Preacher, vanity of vanities; all is vanity.
What profit hath a man of all his labour which he taketh under the sun?
One generation passeth away, and another generation cometh: but the earth abideth for ever.
The sun also ariseth, and the sun goeth down, and hasteth to his place where he arose.
The wind goeth toward the south, and turneth about unto the north; it whirleth about continually, and the wind returneth again according to his circuits.
All the rivers run into the sea; yet the sea is not full; unto the place from whence the rivers come, thither they return again.

Ecclesiastes 1:2-7 (though the Preacher himself concludes that we should enjoy what we are given)

All goals are arbitrary and we pursue them accordingly. The nihilist especially sees no final end for his struggles. I often wonder why the people I admire spend so much time giving up their worldly pleasures for transcendental ideology or base human creations. Even personally, among a Google Calendar with all the hexadecimal codes one can conceive of, I have stopped searching for an answer or creating five-year plans for myself as was my habit.

If there’s anything poker has taught me, it’s that one can make all the ‘right’ decisions and lose. Likewise, one make all the ‘wrong’ things and be rewarded.

I used to believe in:

I used to believe in objective moral truths. The jacked guy is better than the fat guy. It's better to be rich than to be poor. It's better to live in a society with fellow humans than in some secluded grove. It’s significantly preferable to be a founder than an investor. It’s better to have a higher GPA than a lower one. Making a ton of money, or achieving a position in which one was disposed to do so, was simply good, full stop. And many in society would agree with me.

I recently realised that all this stuff is made up. None of this is real. All moral systems of judgement are the output of a function that significantly biases towards the parameter of perspective. The vantage point with which an individual seems to be observing a phenomenon.

If the utility for someone to eat fast food every day and get really fat is higher than the utility of them working out, controlling their diet, and becoming jacked, it makes coherent sense for them to do that, even if they die really early in their life. Perhaps the standards that society measures them with would grade them very low indeed. And would warrant significant outcry if the entire population was theoretically polled and had to make a moral judgement. Smart people create predictive models for sentiment and attempt to rise in k-levels of reasoning to anticipate this, and hence can create feelings of resentment, which can be a real shame.

The Professors Who Stay

In the same way, if someone loves the purity of ideas, and that's their ultimate goal in life and it transcends the utility of the other things in their lives career-wise, it makes coherent sense for them to build their career in academia. How many math professors at Harvard, MIT, and Stanford have the aptitude to leave their academic careers, right now and waltz into highly lucrative quant research positions? Probably a lot of them. You'd wonder, "Why do these people stay in academia when a very obvious choice, if they wanted to optimise for conventional success, was to go do quant?"

It’s because they love the game. They have the choice, and they find beauty in the things that they do. Their staying suggests they value the work on a different scoring system. Camus's Stranger is the limiting case: a man who is indifferent to society's metrics, hence a stranger to it. The novel ends with Meursault awaiting his execution, finding his sense of peace. Let me be clear that I am not proposing we all become our own Meursaults. But rather, that a societally manufactured, aggregate scoreboard composed of people who frankly aren’t all that smart, has always been an optional metric with which individuals, some would say embodied slave morality, would evaluate the desert of their lives.

Where Does "Better" Come From

Nietzsche's On the Genealogy of Morals and Beyond Good and Evil challenges traditional society’s declaration of morality. Not "what is good and righteous?" but "where did our idea of good come from, and who benefited from it?"

Nietzsche says that society’s values have a history, invented by particular people for particular purposes. The noble class first used "good" to mean its own way of living, and later a resentful reversal recast weakness and meekness as virtue. Very simply, a value that looks like an objective fact about the universe (some would call it a categorical imperative) turns out to be a fossil of somebody's self-interest.

And so, why is rich better than poor, founder better than investor, city better than forest, jacked better than fat? Each is a standard that some community built, enforced and rewarded, and each feels objective only to people raised inside it.

For some reason, Nietzsche has always felt life affirming... it gives one permission to will their own strength and growth. As per Steve Jobs, everything around you that you call life was made up by people no smarter than you, and you can change it, influence it, and build your own things that other people can use. In the context of Nietzsche, the 'universal moral laws' which constitute society are created by man, man is fallible, weak, needs guidance, but perhaps not you. You can do the things that are uniquely you if you embody the will to power. Indeed, Nietzsche thought that most people live by herd values and slave morality. The open question is whether you are one of the few who can do otherwise, and you only find out by trying.

The ‘universal laws’ of society are made by man, and man is fallible. I propose that these roots, ironically, trace back theologically to the Original Sin. Were it not for human nature, we would be immortal creatures that would be able to appreciate the beauty of ideas. By ideas, I refer to the mental images that we must describe with flawed languages (see the early Wittgenstein). The perfect ideologies in a mathematical proof are all airtight and sublime. Infallible, owing to a Platonic image of perfection which Nietzsche would reject, though I find it compelling. There would be no loss of information in the corrupted perversion function that humans employ when applying those immortal ideas to a mortal world. An excellent example is money - a flawed, mortal, human creation that perverts all.

When the woman saw that the fruit of the tree was good for food and pleasing to the eye, and also desirable for gaining wisdom, she took some and ate it. She also gave some to her husband, who was with her, and he ate it.

Genesis 3:6

Faith

My friends and I have been talking a lot about limiting the amount we intellectualise the problems we face in our lives. We are trying to embody this idea of just doing things, not thinking too much about how the world will react to your doing of things, but just doing things for the thing’s sake. Being in motion, trying new things, not caring about the consequences or flawed moral judgements of other human beings who probably don’t have the same priorities as us or lack the context or mental faculties to make judgements with complete information.

I have spent much time personally thinking about how to make the most of my career. In fact, one of the first articles I ever published on this website was a reflection on how to make the most out of high school. In the past six months, I have realised that there is truly no point to thinking too much about one’s career. I have had many an enticing offer to drop out and work on exciting projects, but I am trying to exercise and train my judgement by making decisions through my unique view of the world.

The world is going to change so much in the next two years - just look at the advances in technology we have empowered over the past two years. Likewise, I am going to change so much in the next two years before I graduate. All the plans I've had previously have totally changed, and I've become a more interesting, more exciting version of myself just because I've followed my interests in themselves.

I have always, always struggled with the breadth vs depth question, even having studied Decision Theory for some time now. I have realised that intrinsically-motivated exploratory behaviour beats mimetic premature specialisation in a society of rapid change.

It's also a form of faith. Some things don't seem to have short-term benefits to outsiders, and it seems deeply irrational to endure things that are painful in the short-term. But we know, through our faith in ourselves and the perfection of ideologies, that we will live in a way we can affirm. You know yourself and your substance, and the expected value is all that is important, not the results.

Slave Morality

Many think that Nietzsche’s work characterises him as a pure nihilist - one that believes that there is no inherent meaning in the world. Many hear his name and think,’Oh, woe is to Nietzsche, I would never want to think that life is devoid of meaning!’ But the truth couldn’t be further. Nietzsche’s work is all about rejecting this idea of slave morality, of holding a defeatist attitude. He calls us to action and urges us to deeply question the standards that society places on us, to think for ourselves and re-evaluate everything.

Accepting the morality that others proclaim without thinking for yourself - that is herd morality. Or seeing a process designed to demean you, to limit your potential, and accepting it still because you don’t have the agency to take action and create your own path - that is slave morality. False idolatry and the blind acceptance of role models that are in reality terrible people - slave morality. The resultant emotion is ‘ressentiment’, a visceral feeling of contempt, only concentrated by an individual’s lack of action, to cure his helplessness. Like a small fishing boat stranded in the middle of the Atlantic. Tossed around by the Fates, conducting their spirit and will through the waves and whirlpools. The sailor harbours a deep sense of frustration and admiration for the power of the natural world around him - yet he is still a slave to that world.

Master morality is the solution. Instead of suppressing one’s natural human vitality, one should self-actualise and realise their unique will to power, capitalise on that drive to conquer the world. Realise that the world was created for you to go out there and conquer it, not for you to sit there, act as a passive pawn on the chessboard, played by some other king creating their own fate. One will only marinate in ressentiment for themselves and the society built around them if they neglect this thought.

A very easy example in our modern world is compulsive consumption of short-form content, scrolling when one does not choose to. When the brain does not think for itself, it is controlled by the outside world. There is no cheaper or more addictive digital drug than short-form content consisting of Instagram Reels, Youtube Shorts, and the like. Our attention spans and ability to think deeply about the world have been destroyed by the unnatural layering of flashy titles. So much that we devote the same amount of mental energy into enjoying our lives as understanding what the next largest celebrity scandal is. I, and many of my friends, are victims. We grew up with this.

A word of warning: beware of the language models and the potential homogenisation of society. As a result of overreliance we must endeavour to protect our epistemic agency and preserve our ability to form beliefs for ourselves and alter them according to evidence.

The Gay Science

To me, Nietzsche’s The Gay Science is about becoming yourself. It is also the most aphoristic and beautiful of Nietzsche's books, with Horatian and Catullan undertones - I was very excited to learn that Nietzsche was a classical philologist. Perhaps that is why I enjoyed the opening and closing of the work with a selection of poetry.

The Gay Science describes the capacity to create your life to be lived exactly as it is, with no god, no guarantee, and no promise it all means something. In response to nihilism, the dread and ressentiment we feel when we are told that we are cogs in machines, we reply with our fortitude. We cherish our capacity for action, that instead we can summon our will to power, to become ourselves despite our looming condemnation of mortality.

As a test for one’s life, Nietzsche asked how you would feel if a demon told you that you must live your exact life over and over again infinitely, down to every joy and sorrow. Most people would feel absolute terror at this thought, perhaps because they have relinquished control of their lives. It is a litmus test to assess whether a person truly loves and affirms their own life. If you can bear this thought, and even welcome it, you affirm your life as it is - you have transcended the human need for a higher ‘purpose’. A cultivated, refined person who sees laughter and happiness in the truth, who doesn’t need the spiritual narcotic desire for some higher morality. Someone who is compassionate out of strength, not out of weakness and pity. The weak is not inferior, but common, by their own standards.

An Objection

Tracing a value to its origin does not refute it. Learning that "honesty is good" has a history does not make dishonesty equally good. Nietzsche himself never said all standards are equal. He was obsessed with rank, with higher and lower types, with which values make a life stronger and which make it smaller. Perspectivism does not necessitate that "anything goes, depending on your worldview!”

I hold the claim in a narrower form. No metric system of better and worse is written into the universe. Rich over poor, founder over investor, and jacked over fat are standards some community built and enforced. One must be skeptical of the ‘true value’ and ‘market value’ of the institutions and ideologies presented to them. They feel objective only to people raised inside them. But you still have to choose for yourself, and eternal recurrence helps one validate their judgement.

What life would I live, if it was the only one I could live for the rest of time. The mind struggles to encapsulate the concept of infinity, and it never will. Latin, venture, poker, decision theory, writing this essay. If I had to evaluate them against a scoreboard, in ascending order, I’d say that venture, writing, poker, decision theory, and Latin are the things I would do even if no one was watching, and I had to do them for eternity. Notice that the purer disciplines are much closer to the right, and their applications are towards the left. Intuitively, purer activities require less external validation in order for an individual to derive value from them.

If I am to be frank, when I look at this essay, I see a collation of ideas from a variety of authors that are all traditionally famous and esteemed. Perhaps there is a layer of me that wishes to please those who are equally as curious as I am. That desire will never be zero, as long as I live in a society. Perhaps much of my life would fail the eternal recurrence test.

“To the poet and the sage, all things are friendly and hallowed, all experiences useful, all days holy, and all people divine.” - Ralph Waldo Emerson

YZ