“Everything he does is half-assed.” How the quote got back to me, I can’t recall. It was a co-worker commenting on my work ethic some thirty years ago. That I still remember it; that it still stings, is a hint.

Trying to get to sleep last night… those words coming back to me. There was an urge to pray. But to what? To what or whom shall an atheist pray? It’s tough when your only conception of a god is Luck. So there were no prayers uttered. Switched gears. Started thinking about Nietzsche. Listened to Thus Spoke Zarathustra while on a cross-country drive last week. Would I want to re-live this life? Hell No! The brain. It’s all in the brain. There is a neurological explanation for everything, and anyway, what I think about my own life is irrelevant. It’s a life. My own opinion about it at any given moment is irrelevant. Think about how you look at the past. I have thousands of photographs. I don’t remember what I was thinking at the moment those pictures were shot. Was I sick with anxiety? Had I awoken that day with a sense of dread? Or is the smile real? Was I actually happy at that moment? I recall seasons of my life with fondness, remembering only the high points, the successes. But what was I actually thinking while it was happening? Wasn’t I more or less just as miserable, even when life (in retrospect) was going well? What I think about my own life at any given moment is irrelevant.

It’s best to take life as a whole. My half-assed was better than 90% of people’s whole-assed effort for a long time. Best to embrace one’s half-assed nature. People don’t change much. My drive across the country took precisely the same route as a drive I took seven months ago. I thought I was going by a different route. But there were familiar sights and slowly on the first day I realized I was on exactly the same path. And at moments having the same thoughts that I had had seven months earlier. The brain responds to stimuli.

It is the pre-occupation with self, itself, that is killing me. My half-assed self knows it’s half-assed and doesn’t like it. So I think about it. I reflect on it. I obsess over it. And now, sadly, share my half-assed blog with you.

I’ve finally gotten around to reading Nietzsche. For years I avoided him. He was a kind of intellectual bogey man that lurked in the darkness. I ignored him. It didn’t help that he was trivialized in the extremely Anglo-American analytical philosophy department of my undergraduate years. But I should have read him even before my college years. The perfect timing would have been in my late teens when I was first attempting to formulate my own philosophy. And what did that philosophy boil down to? Life is Art.It was my motto. The notion that whatever I did could be transformed into a creative process was exhilarating. It’s a rather naive formulation of one Nietzsche’s best ideas.

But the idea that probably would have done me the most good would have been Nietzsche’s amor fati– love of fate. Nietzsche is counted among the most important influences on existentialist thought, and for good reason. From what I have digested thus far (in Geneology of Morals & The Gay Science) his emphasis on the personal nature of philosophy presages the existentialist program that would follow in the 20th century. Yet this emphasis on the personal, his view of human nature as a will to power seems to be in conflict with fatalism. Why amor fati? He seems to hold Spinoza in high regard; he compliments the Russian personality for its fatalism. His theory of recurrence proves him to be a determinist.

The idea has got me thinking about the concept of fate. Much of religion, in my view, is window-dressing for various forms of fatalism. New York Times columnist Ross Douthat recently had a piece about hell and made the argument that without hell, human freedom made no sense. A damnation-free universe would amount to theistic fatalism. I don’t see how fear of hell, and its coercive implications, entail a greater degree of freedom, but that’s just me. Fatalism is attractive. So little is within our control. Accepting that things are the way they are and could be no other way is the basis of sound mental health. The question of what determines that things are the way they are may be a matter of taste and level of intellectual honesty (or intellectual conscience as Nietzsche calls it).

I experience moments of sublime contentment when I am most keenly aware of my utter lack of responsibility for the world’s state of affairs. To know how little I really matter is the sweetest of consolations. I am moved once again to do art; to act with intention and awareness. I am in constant struggle with accident, that most recalcitrant of artistic media. Only in such a state can I say to Nietzsche that I would be willing to live this life again and again.