Stop Hiding Who You Really Are | The Philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche

Your growth in life depends on how you spend your energy, and the best way to spend your energy is on solving the right problems. But which problems are the right ones to solve? I can’t stress how important, how critical, this question is.

How do you know which problems to work on? The obvious answer is the ones that cost you a little bit of energy to solve but give you the most rewards. And so naturally, the worst way to spend your energy is on solving problems that cost you a lot of energy to solve but give you the least rewards. But this answer is naive, because it depends on calculating the cost and reward of any individual problem, and if you think about it deeply enough, due to the interconnected complexities of the world, you’ll realize that’s pretty much impossible to do.

Lucky for us, “The Problem of Problems” is actually much easier to solve than you might think. The best problems to solve are the ones that choose you, the ones that naturally capture your interest, the ones that spark your curiosity, keep you questioning, ones that you’re afraid to confront, but deep down inside, you know you have to. And you know you have to because they’re the ones confronting you—in interesting or threatening ways.

It’s been my experience in life that once a problem chooses you, it never lets go. It doesn’t go away on its own. It demands a response. And you really only have two ways of responding: voluntarily confront it, or defend yourself from it. And as Nietzsche said in Ecce Homo, in the long run, self-defence is one of the worst ways to spend your energy.

And why is self-defence one of the worst ways to spend your energy? Imagine that you’re living in the wild, and you live in a place surrounded by lots of wolves. And whenever you cook your food, the wolves try and steal it. And to stop them from eating your food, you constantly have to scare them away with a spear. And while you’re scaring one wolf away, another sneaks up from behind and steals some of your food. So now you have to scare him away. So much of your energy is wasted on the simple act of self-protection.

And if you’re in a place where most of your energy is spent on self-protection, the best outcome you can hope for is to simply keep what you have, because most of your energy is spent on protecting what you have rather than growing it. But because you can’t protect yourself perfectly, in all likelihood, you’ll end up even more impoverished over time. And as the number of wolves increase and multiply, you’ll spend more and more of your energy simply trying to keep them away, and as a result, you’ll slowly become more and more impoverished over time. And eventually, you yourself will be the meal.

And these days we spend more time on psychological self-defence rather than physical. But the end result is the same: a giant waste of energy. The main way we defend ourselves psychologically is through the construction of false identities. And you might be thinking, I don’t have any false identities. I’m always myself.

But answer this: how many times do you find yourself biting your tongue, holding yourself back from saying what you wanna say, saying yes when you wanna say no, saying no when you wanna say yes, acting in a certain way to avoid being judged, having negative thoughts and feelings towards someone which you hide from them, talking behind someone’s back or secretly judging them, having to carefully choose your words and walk on eggshells, denying what you really want, or repressing how you really feel?

Be honest with yourself: do you take on a personality just to avoid conflict with others? If the answer is yes, then you’re engaged in an act of psychological self-defence. You have one, or many, false identities. And I know what some of you are thinking. My false identity is a strength. It helps me defend myself and survive.

In the short term, yes. But you can only be on defence for so long. The wolves are here, and you can only defend yourself from them for so long before you exhaust all of your energy. Think about the long-term cost of being on defence. Think about how much energy you spend on constructing false identities to avoid conflict, and what happens? The conflict never gets solved. It never goes away. It only gets worse with time.

And all of this energy you spent growing your false personalities was energy you took away from growing your real self. And the more time you spend creating and maintaining false identities, the more weak and impoverished the real you will become. You’ll become hollow inside. You’ll lose yourself, and you’ll simply become a collection of false personalities, rather than who you really are.

And if you understand what I’m saying, you’ll realize that, at some point, you will have to voluntarily confront the wolves. And if you confront them, if you get rid of them at their source, if you destroy their den so to speak, then you would no longer be stuck in self-defence. And the energy you free up can be spent on gathering even more food—on growth rather than mere protection.

In other words, stop depending on false personalities to get by. At best, they’ll buy you some time. At worst, they’ll make you too weak to save yourself. Prepare yourself to face your problems head on: sincerely, directly, and at the root. Challenge them as soon as you can, because the longer you run and hide, the more your problem grows, and the more a problem grows, the more difficult you might find to face it.

Put yourself in a position where you never have to be false again, as far as that’s possible. Create allies if you can: people whom you don’t have to be false with, who want to help you overcome your wolves. Perhaps you’ve already been running for so long, it seems pointless to try and confront your problem. The tunnel seems too long and dark, and you can’t see a light at the end.

But just because you can’t see the light, it doesn’t mean it isn’t there. I believe that it’s always there, and it’s always worth making the attempt to reach it. Because what’s the alternative? Live a false life? Spend all your energy avoiding your conflicts through false personalities, until eventually your problems grow so big they consume you?

And once you solve the problem at its root, you can spend your extra energy on becoming stronger—flourishing, blooming, on becoming who you really are. And if you ask me, becoming who you really are is the most valuable and meaningful thing to be accomplished in this life. That concludes my exploration of Nietzsche’s teaching. As always, this is just my opinion and understanding of Nietzsche, not advice.

If you’re looking for another video to watch after this one, I recommend watching my video “Nietzsche - Doubt Your Beliefs, Become Free.” I’ll put a link to it in the description below and in the top right of the screen right now.