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18. Is the examined life worth living? Nietzsche and the curse of consciousness
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Socrates claimed the unexamined life isn’t worth living—but Nietzsche wasn’t so sure. What if our acute self-awareness is the source of our suffering?
In this episode, we journey from the carefree contentment of grazing cattle to the haunted introspection of the modern human. We explore Nietzsche’s radical claim that consciousness is not our crowning glory but a socially evolved disease—a by-product of language, hierarchy, and domestication that alienates us from nature, from one another, and from ourselves.
We trace the emergence of consciousness as an evolutionary trade-off: a tool for collective organisation that became a prison of self-surveillance and moral guilt. Along the way, we confront the “hard problem” of consciousness from a wholly different angle—what if the problem is not the mind’s mystery, but the false metaphysics smuggled in by language itself?
Finally, we consider Nietzsche’s Dionysian remedy—a return to the primal unity beneath the illusions of thought, a dangerous dance with chaos that may cost you your “self”… but might just offer something deeper in return.
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