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2 Philosophical Stories That Taught Me to Think For Myself
Sometimes, all you’re missing is an understanding of what’s possible.
Philosophy has been the most powerful tool that I’ve used to improve my life.
Ever since I finished college a bit over a year ago, I’ve gone on a bit of a rabbit hole studying philosophy and writing about the things that I’ve learned. While I’m certainly no sage or philosophical expert, I’ve learned quite a few interesting things over the past year from studying Nietzsche, Plato, Buddha, and others.
I’m just a newb in the world of philosophical knowledge, but I’ve learned a lot so far.
These are 2 stories that inspired me to start thinking more for myself by challenging the status quo.
Nietzsche’s Metamorphoses
I write about Friedrich Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra a lot, but that’s only because I think that it’s one of the most powerful and thought-provoking philosophical stories of all time. I mean, the guy who wrote it literally drove himself mad in part due to his deep passion for philosophy.
If anything, Nietzsche is a reminder that the existential abyss exists, and that you have to be careful.
Zarathustra’s journey is difficult to read and even more difficult to understand. If I’m being honest, I didn’t understand about half of the book the first time I went through it. However, the first chapter of the book is something I did understand, and it gave me the courage to take a leap of faith into the unstable, unconventional world of being a writer.
That’s right, it was the story about running away from society that was written by a crazy guy with a walrus mustache that inspired me to become a writer. It wasn’t Mark Manson, it wasn’t Stephen King, it was Nietzsche.
It inspired me because it taught me that if I didn’t take this leap, I’d forever be a camel.
See, in Nietzsche’s Metamorphoses (in the opening pages of Thus Spoke Zarathustra), he tells the reader that by taking the quest toward “self-mastery” with him, he’s making the first shift from a cow (sheep or “sheeple”, as they say) to a camel.
