Wretched contentment: October of Zarathustra

Wretched contentment

Thus Spoke Zarathustra, day 1 — Zarathustra’s Prologue

George Mason University’s Robin Hanson has been writing about the slow collapse of Western Civilization. The collapse can be seen right now, he says, in the form of low fertility. If a population doesn’t stop shrinking, then that population will go away eventually. 

This is self-evident.

There’s a lot of ways to quibble with Hanson’s example, but his larger point is that changes in how we live in the West, our values, are no longer governed by selective pressures. In ancient times, cultures pushed right up against each other. They competed with each other for resources. They competed for productivity. They also competed with disease, which was always looking for a reason to kill them.

Culture was, effectively, a set of heuristics that said: If we live this way, we tend to reproduce and also not die. 

Today, in most of the world, you can live your whole life relatively secure that the forces that killed men and women in ancient times (invasions, hunger, disease, brigands) probably won’t get you. Your biggest risks come from heart disease (which, to an extent, is a disease of plenty) and car collisions (which is definitely a disease of plenty).

Living without the big risks is no recipe for happiness, precisely, but it is a recipe for contentment. 

And the whole point of the prologue seems to be that it’s better to die suddenly from living alive than to live a long time in a slow death.

So Zarathustra comes down off his mountain and tries to tell that to people and they laugh at him and make fun of them.

Of course they do. No one wants to hear that they are living life wrong. 

But even if they did want to hear it, that probably wouldn’t help much.

The misery of philosophy is that you can find your way to a deep truth and you can feel that truth in your bones, but you’re never going to convey it in words. There’s so much that we know that we can’t say. We can point to the deep truth we’ve found, but people won’t find it themselves unless they follow where you point and get their themselves through direct experience.

You can read the recipe of the muffin and that won’t tell you one single thing about what it will be like to bite into the muffin. It goes even deeper than that. Biting into the muffin made using the same recipe might even vary quite a bit from one baker to another.

Words are low bandwidth. Even if Zarathustra really has cracked the code of death and resurrection, he’s doomed never to be able to share that code with anyone else. 

On reading

This is my second time reading this book. I previously read it in 2019 to 2020. I finished it in February 2020. Little did I know that I was about to "go under" in a big way! And I was going to go with everyone else!

My intention now is to read a little bit of it each morning until I finish it at the end of October, and write a little bit each day. 

Reading the prologue again this morning, I remember feeling the same way as when I started it back in 2019. The prologue is really invigorating. I think I get the point. I can follow it. I like the imagery and the character of Zarathustra. I like how it all ties together.

The big theme of the book is going under and going over. So opening with a tight rope walker who falls off the tight rope and dies is a little on the nose, but I’ll allow it.

I recalled today thinking what I thought the last time: This is going to be an incredible book.

But I also remember getting frustrated shortly thereafter, because it became really hard to follow. I had no idea what the point of many chapters were. I think I even sometimes felt that I didn’t even know what was happening. 

Which brings me to the next part, which is how I’m trying to change my whole mindset about the book. I now understand that this book was meant not as an argument, but as an opening, a portal. Nietzsche write it as a way to point you to the deeper truths, to illuminate the path. He’s not trying to spell it out, because, again: you can’t.

So I am going to try to read it in that spirit. I don’t know that I’m there yet, though. The real challenges are ahead. I know that when I’m confused that’s going to be the time to get my mind in a different place, to look at the words in a different way.

On writing

I don’t know what kind of blogging I want to do abou this book, but this post isn’t it.

This is a bad post. 

I want to write a commentary on this book that enters into the spirit of Thus Spoke Zarathustra, which Nietzsche intended to work more like scripture than essay. I want to write things that spring out of it. That draw inspiration from it. 

I don’t really want to explain it. Who am I to explain it, anyway?

But old habits die hard, so this is the post I wrote today.

One line

I love the great despisers, because they are the great adorers and arrows of longing for the other shore.

• Zarathustra yelling to the crowd.
• My reading: The ones who complain about everything do so because they expect better. They aren’t content with good enough.

Note: I’m reading the edition of the book translated by Clancy Martin

—Brady Dale
October 1, 2026