Nate Anderson: In Emergency, Break Glass: What Nietzsche Can Teach Us About Joyful Living in a Tech-Saturated World

• Nietzsche isn’t amoral—he simply believes that negative morality is, in a word, too easy. We need something that calls for our striving, not just our renunciation. (Chapter: Two The Secret of My Happiness)
• Nietzsche is not commending “resignation” even to evil. He encourages us to change our lives and the world, while at the same time accepting our creature-ness and our limits without resentment (Chapter: Four Wisdom Won by Walking)
• if life evolved through struggle, growing ever more prodigally diverse as the millennia ticked on, then creative struggle becomes not just a matter of “artistic temperament” but a bedrock principle of existence.“ (Chapter: Two The Secret of My Happiness)
• technology is “a product of the highest intellectual energies” and that it “releases a vast quantity of energy in general that would otherwise lie dormant.” Machines can free us from drudgery, but these unlocked energies are always at risk of waste. When they don’t encourage human creativity, machines re-create humanity in their own image: active but uncreative, powerful but identical. Humans, and our work, become commodities (Chapter: Two The Secret of My Happiness)
• we have the irony of humanity’s creations sapping humanity of creativity, turning us into the “last man (Chapter: Two The Secret of My Happiness)
• Lower risk and greater control intoxicate us. Together, they breed cultures of safety, where setbacks look more like failures of planning than unavoidable consequences of risking ourselves to an uncontrollable world. (Chapter: Two The Secret of My Happiness)
• Nietzsche’s basic premise: Failure is an option. It is the necessary correlate of living the kind of life worth living, of having the kind of goal worth having. (Chapter: Two The Secret of My Happiness)
• That’s the heart of the approach that Nietzsche develops toward knowledge: Know yourself. Know your limits and embrace them. Reject the burden of any information that does not contribute to living your life. (Chapter: One Burn the Boats)
• “Embedded in every tool is an ideological bias,” he writes, “a predisposition to construct the world as one thing rather than another, to value one thing over another, to amplify one sense or skill or attitude more loudly than another.” Or as Nietzsche himself puts it: “The press, the machine, the railway, the telegraph are premises whose thousand-year conclusion no one has yet dared to draw.” (Chapter: Two The Secret of My Happiness)
• It’s a gift to exist, and with existence comes suffering. There’s no escape from that,” Colbert said in a 2019 interview. To be grateful for one’s life means “you have to be grateful for all of it. You can’t pick and choose what you’re grateful for.” (Chapter: Four Wisdom Won by Walking)
• Nietzsche is well known for his hatred of asceticism. He saw it as turning one’s back on life, a No-saying to the world. “The ascetic treats life as a wrong road on which one must finally walk back to the point where it begins,” he complains, “or as a mistake that is put right by deeds.” (Chapter: Three The Information Diet)
• Nietzsche flips asceticism on its head. He accepts the need for restriction, for discipline, for No-saying, but only when it is done in the service of life. (Chapter: Three The Information Diet)
• Everything begins with attention. 2. The question of what I should give attention to is inseparable from the question of what I should decline to give attention to. (Chapter: Three The Information Diet)
• Nietzsche worries that humans have become such creatures of reason and self-reflection that they are incapable of committing their full attention to the present moment—of inhabiting experience rather than reflecting upon it. (Chapter: One Burn the Boats)
• Under the influence of the 1980s band Survivor, I adopted the Eye of the Tiger. I would change the world—and I’d enjoy doing it. Yet one day I woke to find that carpe diem! had been replaced by “How many emails can I answer before noon?” (Chapter: One Burn the Boats)
• Approach information with your eyes open. With every texting relationship, every group chat, every email chain, every book we read, every series we binge, every link we click—we place our fragile attention in the hands of someone else. It is an act of trust, and we benefit from taking that act seriously. (Chapter: Three The Information Diet)
• One doesn’t want a purely Dionysian experience of life, which would amount to the dissolution of the self, a lack of control over one’s mind and body, and the loss of reason’s gifts. But Nietzsche argues that an overly Apollinated humanity needs more of the Dionysian (Chapter: One Burn the Boats)
• Logic cannot give us Wordsworth’s sublime terror in a rowboat. Reason itself becomes self-interruption of and internal commentary upon our own sense experience. Reality becomes too thought about to be felt. There is wisdom in the body that the mind knows nothing of (Chapter: One Burn the Boats)
• “What is striking is that simply being alone with their own thoughts for 15 min[utes] was apparently so aversive that it drove many participants to self-administer an electric shock that they had earlier said they would pay to avoid.” (Chapter: Two The Secret of My Happiness)
• The “will to power” is the evolutionary pressure to exert ourselves in the world, to leave a mark, to create and to reproduce. (Chapter: Two The Secret of My Happiness)

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/58999200-in-emergency-break-glass