I was organizing my bookshelves when one of the books slipped and fell to the floor. It was Friedrich Nietzsche’s The Genealogy of Morals. I picked it up, opened it, and read the first lines of the preface: “We are unknown, we knowers, ourselves to ourselves: this has its own good reason. We have never searched for ourselves — how should it then come to pass, that we should ever find ourselves.”
‘What he says is true,’ I said. ‘Although, I remember a time when I was out there searching for myself. That’s how I spent my twenties, looking for purpose and the meaning of life, trying to figure out whether I was born to be a rockstar or an entrepreneur. But every discovery I made I drowned in whisky. And I had a good reason to do so: I did not like what I found.’
Today, I’m thirty-four, and I still don’t know who I am or what my purpose is.
The meaninglessness of everything demotivates me, though it cannot keep me from living my life to the fullest. I often manage to forget my inescapable, inevitable death and the absurdity of life, and I manage to enjoy the moment.
But that’s not the point. That’s not the point, at all.
Maybe we — knowers or not — can never find ourselves.
I don’t know… Can’t we? Maybe we can.
On the other hand, sometimes, the goal seems to be the exact opposite — to lose yourself, to get lost, to be intoxicated by life and lose control, to let go, to drown in the sea of forgetfulness and become one with the forgotten. Sometimes, to find ourselves means to lose ourselves.
