Every January we’re handed the same cultural script: new year, new you. Eat better. Quit this. Start that. This year, I wanted something sturdier. Something that didn’t just aim at improvement, but at alignment. So I chose Nietzsche’s “eternal recurrence.”
His lens boils down to a single question.
Is this a life I would be willing to live again?
For me, this question arrives at a heavy moment. The world feels unsettled politically, well, a bit crazy, a bit Nazi-ish. Closer to home life is bittersweet. Parts of my old life are clearly behind me now, and I feel the weight of that change.
Most days are good, but I feel like I spend a lot of time pushing back against bad ideas, careless habits, and my own shortcomings. More than once this year, I’ve caught myself asking:
Is this the world I want to live in?
Is this year a year I would live over and over, forever? Not exactly the same—but the same routines, commitments, distractions, and the same work toward unfinished dreams. Would you? Can we be at peace with our decisions? Or, like me, is there something in you quietly protesting? That right there, that’s why I’ve named this year the “Year of the Eternal Recurrence.”
When Meaning Is No Longer Given
About 200 years ago, Kierkegaard taught us to listen to our anxiety, to treat angst as a signal that something meaningful is at stake. A few decades later, Nietzsche pushed us further when he declared that “God is dead.” Not literally, he was naming a condition. The old sources of ready-made meaning–religion, tradition, unquestioned authority. That collapse isn’t a tragedy, it’s an opening. A demanding one. If meaning is no longer handed down, then it must be created. And that responsibility falls squarely on the individual.
We are all born into a specific time and place, and we inherit our initial worldview. This includes your language and cadence, your religion and belief system, and your personal philosophy. Once inherited, you have choices. Nietzsche is asking you to challenge the social constructs that rub you the wrong way. Not the ones you like. Keep those. But the things you absorbed simply by being born into a time and place. For Nietzsche, self-becoming begins not with resting in the comfort of tradition, but with the courage to carve out your own authentic life.
When a Question Becomes a Test
Nietzsche introduced the Eternal Recurrence as a provocation. In “The Gay Science,” Nietzsche frames the idea as a thought experiment, delivered by a demon. A demon who appears in your loneliest moment and asks whether you could endure your life again and again, unchanged in its essentials. The passage’s power is psychological. How you react to this thought tells you something powerful. Are you living? Or are you tolerating?
Kierkegaard’s angst signals daily reminders to change course. Nietzsche’s eternal recurrence is the next litmus test. Look through this lens at each part of your life. If repetition of something in your life feels unbearable, that tells you to take action. Take responsibility. It’s time to live more deliberately. Later, in “Ecce Homo,” Nietzsche names the emotional core of this idea: amor fati. The love of one’s fate. Not passive acceptance, but wholehearted affirmation.
Identity Is Pattern
Existentialism was always clear-eyed about one thing: not everything about you is negotiable. You are born into a particular time and place. You are born human, with a body you didn’t choose, a biology you inherit, and traits that arrive without asking permission—your limits, your desires. These facts are real. They matter. They shape the space in which your life unfolds.
Existentialism reminds us that meaning isn’t preloaded. It emerges through how you live within your givens, your constraints. Through your choices, your commitments, and the patterns you build a life. Existence comes first. Essence is what forms afterward.
Neuroscience adds an important twist to all this. Biologically, you’re changing all the time. Cells renew. Yet somehow, you still feel like you.
That feeling of continuity comes from sustained patterns. Your brain maintains identity through habits, emotional responses, and the story you keep telling about who you are. Identity isn’t a thing you possess. It’s a process your brain runs.
This is where the cliché “fake it till you make it” turns into science. Repetition matters. Acting “as if” you are becoming someone changes short-term behavior—and over time, it changes you.
There’s another layer to this too. Memory itself isn’t static. When you recall a memory, you reshape it, then store it again. That means your past isn’t frozen; it’s rewritten as you live. This isn’t metaphor. It’s biology. The neuroplasticity of your brain is constantly restructuring. The neural pathways and the fine-tuning of synaptic strength evolve through experience. Those changes, that’s you.
An Ancient Question, Revisited
Long before Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, humans were already wrestling with how to live honestly amid suffering, impermanence, and uncertainty. Eastern traditions didn’t frame this as “existentialism,” but the concern was the same. Buddhism questioned self as “non-self.” Daoism urged alignment with nature.
Modern existentialism reframed an ancient human concern: how to live truthfully when no script can be assumed.
Intent Is Not Enough
There’s a moment where thinking stops helping. Where reflection turns into delay. Marcus Aurelius captured it cleanly:
stop wishing to be a good person—be one.
No more rehearsal. No more internal speeches. Just action. Intent doesn’t cause change on its own. Wishful thinking assumes that wanting something is enough to make it real. It isn’t. Magical thinking cannot reshape reality. Real change is mechanical and what matters. Nietzsche is simply asking you to stop mistaking habit for choice.
From Despair to Self-Becoming
Existentialism emerged in post-medieval Europe, but its core concern—the struggle to live honestly inside one’s own mind—echoes much older traditions. Its roots stretch back into prehistory, to the first humans who noticed fear, desire, and self-awareness.
In many ways, the modern history of existentialism is also the history of psychology. Both trace the contours of human struggle. Both ask how thought, anxiety, and meaning shape a life. Both took modern form in the late 1700s and 1800s. For existentialism’s part, it stripped away the shared assumptions and forced the question inward.
Our modern story often begins with Arthur Schopenhauer, who saw life as driven by blind will—an endless striving. While he saw suffering, others took his insight and moved it into the light.
Søren Kierkegaard treated angst as guidance. His focus on anxiety is often seen as one of the ideas that helped inspire the birth of modern psychology a few decades later, in 1879. Life, he argued, is a series of choices made without certainty. Angst is the price of freedom. In my own writing, I reframe his religious “leap of faith” as something broader—the leap we take with every meaningful decision.
Meanwhile, Friedrich Nietzsche transformed Schopenhauer’s blind will into self-creation. “God is dead” was not despair, but a challenge. If meaning isn’t given, it must be made.
The truth is, I’m pretty happy. I just turned 61, and this question has become clarifying rather than paralyzing. Some parts of my life aren’t easy, and on the surface, they might not look like things I’d want to repeat forever—standing up, speaking out, and protesting. Is this really the world I want for me? When I sit with the question honestly, the answer surprises me. Yes—I do want to live in a world where I stand up to what I believe is wrong. I want a life where I speak honestly about ideas that matter, even when it’s uncomfortable. I want a life where I work, however imperfectly, to bring people closer rather than further apart. I’m grateful to have found a second love, and I believe a second chapter can be just as meaningful as the first.
But the eternal recurrence lens is reminding me of something quieter and closer to home too. It isn’t about blowing up my life. It’s about tending to it. To enjoy what I already embrace. To stop letting small neglects pile up. A clean kitchen in the morning. A pool without months of leaves. Finishing the garage this summer, not next. More nights at the beach, a drink by a fire, a meal out just because. Golf. Table tennis. Old coins pulled back out of their boxes. If I’m going to live this life again and again, I want it to be cared for—deliberately, lovingly, and fully lived in the present.
So let’s bring this story to a close with a simple reminder to live in the now.
Existentialism is traditionally framed as a crossroads between despair and resolve. But its real gift is clarity. You look into the void just long enough to shed unwanted social constructs and take responsibility for becoming who you choose to be. Nietzsche’s Eternal Recurrence sharpens that lens–showing you how to live your life well lived.