LXXI. Nietzsche's Consolations for Difficulties
What Friedrich Nietzsche Can Teach Us About Suffering, How to Sublimate Difficulty, Against Alcohol & Christianity, The Meaning of Fulfillment, Greatness—the Übermensch, Longing & Living Dangerously.
Welcome! Note that the ‘Neuroscience-based Tools’, ‘Lead to Win’ & the Le Monde Élégant social skills sections are companions for The Stoic Manual to enhance your physical and psychological health, vitality, stress resilience, discipline, focus, motivation, and refine your people skills, relationships & leadership skills for a distinguished life—by Dr. Antonius Veritas
“Examine the lives of the best and most fruitful people and peoples and ask yourselves whether a tree that is supposed to grow to a proud height can dispense with bad weather and storms; whether misfortune and external resistance, some kinds of hatred, jealousy, stubbornness, mistrust, hardness, avarice, and violence do not belong among the favourable conditions without which any great growth even of virtue is scarcely possible.” —Friedrich Nietzsche
“We must learn to suffer whatever we cannot avoid. Our life is composed, like the harmony of the world, of discords as well as of different tones, sweet and harsh, sharp and flat, soft and loud. If a musician liked only some of them, what could he sing? He has got to know how to use all of them and blend them together. So too must we with good and ill, which are of one substance with our life.” — Michel De Montaigne
“To regard states of distress in general as an objection, as something that must be abolished, is the [supreme idiocy], in a general sense a real disaster in its consequences … almost as stupid as the will to abolish bad weather. ”
the consolation we rarely hear
We do not suffer well.
In the age of unearned dopamine, difficulty feels like failure. We leave jobs that disillusion us. We ghost the people we connect with. We abandon writing projects, exercise routines, relationships, entire lives—at the first sign that they demand more of us than we planned to give. We don’t even call it giving up anymore. We call it self-care.
But what if the pain wasn’t a sign that something is wrong with us? What if it's proof that the blue hydrangea of our lives is blooming?
When life wounds us—quietly, persistently, or with the sudden violence of loss—we rarely get real help. We get sedation. The wine glass. The reels. The mantra. The church sermon or the corporate motivational talk. “Everything happens for a reason.” “You’re doing great.” “Just be grateful.” These are not falsehoods in the factual sense. They are lies in the moral sense—the lies we offer one another when we’re afraid to tell the truth plainly: that life will often require more than we think we can bear, and that this is not a tragedy.
Most of us do not need cheerleaders. We need allies. Someone who will sit beside us in the storm and say, without blinking: “Yes, it’s hard. No, it’s not unfair. Let’s go on nonetheless.”
Friedrich Nietzsche did not believe in easy answers, and he certainly didn’t offer them. He’s often miscast as a nihilist, as if his only message were the void. But that’s not true. He wasn’t opposed to meaning—he was opposed to false comforts that stood in its place. If anything, he was a kind of subterranean optimist: one who believed, fiercely and even tenderly, that we were capable of more life, more intensity, more power—if only we stopped fleeing the weight of being alive.
What makes Nietzsche a valuable companion in our worst moments is that he does not flinch. He doesn’t insult our intelligence with platitudes. He doesn’t soothe us with fantasies of karmic justice. He offers something much more demanding, and more respectful: an invitation to reframe our suffering not as a curse, but as a process—as the cost of building a life that matters.
“To those human beings who are of any concern to me,” he wrote, “I wish suffering, desolation, sickness, ill-treatment, indignities… I wish that they should not remain unfamiliar with profound self-contempt, the torture of self-mistrust, the wretchedness of the vanquished.”
Cruel? Not at all. Not once we understand his intent.
We are not strengthened by comfort. We are not sharpened by praise. We do not discover who we are when everything is going our way. We discover it in the weight—when things go dark, and we are asked by existence itself: will you turn this pain into something beautiful, or will you retreat?
How many times have we asked, “Why is this happening to me?”—as if difficulty were an error, a malfunction, something we should have avoided? But what if the real question is this: What is this pain asking me to become?
This is not a call to glorify suffering. Nietzsche never said pain was good in itself. But he said something braver: that pain, rightly interpreted, can be the gateway to everything worth having—depth, clarity, conviction, creation, connection. He wanted us to stop confusing discomfort with misdirection. He wanted us to feel what we feel, and still move forward—not out of masochism, but out of maturity.
There’s a reason the old mythmakers always paired the hero with exile, the lover with longing, the poet with torment. It was not because life is cruel. It was because transformation is.
Have we forgotten that?
We live in a culture obsessed with ease, saturated with messages that say: “If it’s hard, it’s wrong.” But what if the opposite were true? What if the best parts of us—the parts we respect when we meet them in others—are forged only by hardship?
This essay is not an escape hatch. It’s a companion for the climb. It won’t offer synthetic joy. You’ll get respect for your difficulty, and the tools to use it—to make something of it. We will walk with Nietzsche up the slopes of solitude, envy, creative despair, illness, romantic rejection, and failure. And we will ask the only questions that matter: Can this be transformed? Can we stay honest? Can we still love what we long for—even when life says no?
We begin not with comfort, but with clarity.
And clarity, as Nietzsche knew, is colder than comfort—but far more useful. Let’s get into it.
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