Good morning!

Happy Monday! I’m sorry for leaving you hungry for two days last week. I’m back now and ready to dive in!

This week might be a more focused one. I’m reading Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil and might use the week to dig into it a bit. If you’ve never read the book, feel free to read along with me this week!

Today, we’ll be diving into §13 of Beyond Good and Evil, where Nietzsche rejects self-preservation as life’s goal. Burning that off, we’ll do the Strength Check. Wrapping up, we’ll look at a line from this section in the book.

“All aboard, you philosophers!” Thought Breakfast is served!

Most people organize life around minimizing or even avoiding pain. We chase things like security, comfort, stability, etc. In the background, our true ambitions fade away. Survival becomes the quiet definition of success. Modern life treats self-preservation as if it’s the highest virtue, but Nietzsche says it is merely a consequence of the actual higher virtue.

He pushes back against the idea that life is mainly about survival. He criticizes the belief that every living thing exists primarily to preserve itself. In just a short section of one of his masterpieces, Nietzsche argues that life seeks something deeper: expression, expansion, venting of strength… Life is not driven by preservation, but by the will to power.

Growth demands struggle. After all, you can’t sharpen a knife without friction. Becoming stronger requires things like failure, exposure, discomfort, and above all, uncertainty. A life built only around protection and survival becomes smaller and smaller over time. Avoiding risk is avoiding growth.

Safety is useful to us without a doubt. But it should not be used as a hiding place. We stay within our predictable routines, identities, and relationships, because they offer stability even if they don’t offer growth. These things can offer us comfort, which simply preserves us while preventing development.

Nietzsche is basically saying that human beings are like food in the fridge. It is the safe place to preserve food, but if the food stays there too long, it still goes bad, and any opportunity to enjoy it has been lost.

Don’t stay in the fridge.

Ask yourself:

“A living thing desires above all to vent its strength — life as such is will to power — : self-preservation is only one of the indirect and most frequent consequences of it.”
— Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil §13

This is where Nietzsche challenges one of our deepest assumptions: that life is mainly about staying safe. He argues that living things are driven first by the need to express strength, to grow, to push outward, and simply to become more. Survival definitely matters, but it should be understood as a mere consequence of living fully. A life built only around comfort and protection can quietly become smaller and smaller. Growth demands risk, friction, and the courage to move beyond simple preservation.

Munch on that for today. Have a great day, and come back tomorrow for another steaming hot plate of Thought Breakfast!

Yeah. That Arnold Schwarzenegger.

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Remember to stay mindful, smell the flowers, and take it easy.

Chef Ricky - Thought Breakfast