A sacred "No"

October of Zarathustra

A few years before the pandemic, when I was still living in Brooklyn, I was running around with a small group of guys for a bit. One of them was, effectively, the leader. It was funny, too, because he was the shortest, smallest of us, but still he reigned as the alpha of this little crew. 

You don't see that often!

He was the nicest guy, in a way, but he also had this autocratic way about him. He cared a lot about being chill, and he really actively enforced the whole "chill" vibe in his circle. If you started to get too intense about things, he would let you know. I have noticed that the most laid back people often seem to be the biggest hard asses about conformity.

They want everyone to conform to being laid back.

This guy was really into video games. I don't like video games much. I've gotten sucked into the Charybdis of a game or two over the course of my life (Civilization and Magic the Gathering: Arena, mainly), but largely I've been happy to eschew that particular artform. But he was really into videogames, and — like everything else he liked — he would really push you to try out his favorite things.

One time I was over at his house and he wanted me to play a game he thought was really great. It was an indie game, an experimental game. A game more made as a commentary than what we traditionally think of as a video game. 

I think it might have been The Stanley Parable, but I'm not sure. I described the game to Gemini, and that's what it came up with. The whole conceit of the game is that your character appears in this place and a voice tells you what to do. If you do what it says it will lead you out of the game directly and easily — you will "win," But winning isn't really the point. 

If you do other things it will start to yell at you. That's actually the point. Exploring how angry you can make the narrator about your misbehavior is the whole joke.

So, reluctantly, I "played" the game. But I just did what the voice said and I got out and it was over. Thank goodness. My friend was pretty agitated the whole time as I did this, because I was playing it wrong — but he didn't want to tell me and spoil it. He was hoping I would discover the fun of this fake thing. But I did what video games in the past had trained me to do — I followed the path it indicated till I was done. 

So then he showed me what was so great about the game. He started playing it over and disobeying and the narrator got agitated which was funny I guess. I remember he really loved showing me how long you could stay in this one closet moving around and not leaving. The narrator got so furious if you just wouldn't leave. 

And look if that's how you get your kicks, go off king. It's just not for me.

But I've thought about this more than I'd like to admit over the years. I wondered: Am I just a muggle who conforms to what's expected of me? Is that what my play-through of that game showed me? 

Or... Do I just not particularly care about having "experiences" in video games? 

I thought about this as I read the first few speeches of Zarathustra in Thus Spoke Zarathustra this morning, day 2 of my month of Nietzsche's masterpiece. These first four speeches are mostly about non-conformity, after all. 

It surprises me how that memory has stuck with me. There's a lot of things I don't remember about that time of my life, but I do remember playing that stupid game and being made to feel that — as much as I might like to think of myself as my own man — it showed that I just follow the instructions.

But reading Nietzsche this morning gave me a different interpretation. Maybe playing it wrong was a polite way of saying: "I don't want to play your stupid video game. The sun is shining."

I. The Three Metamorphoses 

My take: You only start to live after you learn to resist all the institutions attempting to tell you what to do. Once you find your "sacred 'No,'" your refusal to follow other's rules, then you become a baby — you can start becoming yourself.

II. On The Teachers of Virtue

My take: Sleep is your body's way of telling you whether or not you managed to live that day. A person who has tired out their body and cleared out their mind can sleep soundly. 

• This one is a dig at academia. Academia has not changed. It still parodies itself!

III. The Afterworldly

My take: Dreams of a utopia after death are a cope for those who hate being alive.

IV. Despisers of the Body

My take: The body is the source of wisdom. The brain was the body's invention to get it what it wants. More pleasure. Less pain. So the brain is higher than the spirit, which is an epiphenomenon of the brain.

This one hit me. When you think through the evolution, bodies did precede brains. We tend to think of our brains as so special, because our brains are what have given humans our advantage over all other animals. And that's true.

Zarathustra says, "There is more reason in your body than in your best wisdom."

But the body really did come first. The brain is the servant of the body. I had never thought of it that way. I missed this on my first reading, too. That's deeper than a whale corpse.

The big question that we're finally getting to here in 2026, though, is: The body certainly preceded the brain, but did the body precede the mind? 

One line

"It is no small art to sleep: for that purpose you must keep awake all day." —Zarathustra.

When I read this in 2019, I wrote a note at the top of the page that I stand by to this day: "So here for the philosophy of sleep." 

At the end of the speech, he adds, "Blessed are the sleepy ones." That's good news. I have always been so sleepy, and I just keep getting sleepier. 

—Brady Dale
October 2, 2026

Next Zarathustra: Write with blood