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Amy Sukwan's avatar

Love this post! Life is always at best a calculated risk but risks fuel evolution especially in the young. What I notice is that those who take safety first as a mindset live incredibly cloistered lives of quiet desperation and often engage in habits that are very unsafe in the long run: they marry the safe choice, stay in the same safe group of associates who validate their perceptions, watch the glowing screens all day, and drown themselves in pointless addictions whether it be drugs, porn, alcohol, shopping or Netflix. They're living vicariously and not really living. You have to make peace with the inevitability of your own death which leads on to what legacy you want to leave behind

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Clever Pseudonym's avatar

Your amazingly excellent essay brought to mind that crazy German genius who not only predicted the wars of the 20th century but also the "Safety First" epitaph of Western Civ.

This is from his Zarathustra:

"Behold! I show you the last man.

‘What is love? What is creation? What is longing? What is a star?’ – thus asks the last man, blinking.

Then the earth has become small, and on it hops the last man, who makes everything small. His kind is ineradicable, like the flea beetle; the last human being lives longest.

‘We invented happiness’ – say the last men, blinking.

They abandoned the regions where it was hard to live: for one needs warmth. One still loves one’s neighbor and rubs up against him: for one needs warmth.

No shepherd and one herd! Each wants the same, each is the same, and whoever feels differently goes voluntarily into the insane asylum."

Nietzsche knew how fear, conformity, and the sterility of comfort uber alles produced a sort of anti-life or death-in-life, certainly no real life worth living.

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