Nietzsche - Don’t Let Your Darkness Consume You

In /On the Genealogy of Morals/, Nietzsche compares the feeling of resentment to a toxin or an illness, because he believes that resentment is anti-life and anti-growth. This is a sentiment I agree with, and it’s an idea I wanna explore for myself. Why do we become resentful? What happens when we become resentful? And how do we prevent ourselves from becoming resentful? These are some of the questions I wanna grapple with and explore in this essay.

So let’s start at the beginning: where does resentment come from? Finn, a 28 year old man, is resentful towards women as a whole, but he wasn’t always this way. How did he get here? Frustration. A lot of pent up frustration. But how did this frustration accumulate? Rejection. For years, Finn has approached women that he perceived as beautiful and asked them out on dates. And every single time, he received a no. Why? One might have thought he was unattractive, one might have been already taken, one might have simply not been interested, one might have thought he was creepy, so and so forth. Every woman had her own reason. But Finn took the rejection very personally. Why?

Think about it: do we take all rejections personally? If I ask a stranger for a ride, do I get mad if they say no? If I go up to someone and say, “give me some money,” do I become resentful if they say no? If I try to flap my arms and fly, do I become resent at the world for not giving me wings? I only become resentful if I feel you’re blocking me from what I’m entitled to. The keyword here is /entitlement/. Finn believes women are objects that he’s entitled to, and their lack of surrender, their lack of submission, the expression of their own autonomy and freedom is a threat to his perceived entitlement.

So rejected entitlement leads to frustration, and accumulated frustration leads to resentment. And so the belief behind resentment, if I’m going to put it simply, is this: /“you shouldn’t be in my way”/. Resentment builds when I believe you’re preventing me from receiving what I’m entitled to. The resentful eye is always looking for someone to blame.

So what happens when we become resentful? Like Nietzsche said, resentment is anti-life and anti-growth, and unfortunately, we’ve seen stories like Finn play out in real life many times. The resentful want to annihilate that which they resent. They want to destroy the thing they think is blocking them from getting what they believe they deserve. Resentment is, at best, a win-lose game. One person has to lose so the other can win. But more often, resentment is a lose-lose game. The feeling of resentment doesn’t feel good, so if I carry it with me, I’m already losing. And if I act on my resentments, it’s a loss for the people who I act it out on.

So how do we prevent ourselves from becoming resentful? In order to defuse all resentment in the mind, this idea has to be true: /there’s a place in this world, and a way to that place, for everyone which can’t be denied by anyone except for themselves/. In other words, it’s not possible for anyone to truly get in your way. That’s the idea that would have to be true for resentment to never build up in the mind. If we return to the example of Finn, this may mean that he believes, no matter how many times he’s rejected, that there is a right person out there for him.

And there’s a way to find and connect with that person, but he just hasn’t found the right way yet. And now you may be wondering: is it true? Is there a place in this world, and a way to that place, for everyone which can’t be denied by anyone except for themselves? Can I construct a scientific experiment to prove that it’s true? What would that experiment look like? Let’s return to our example. Imagine Finn lives out his whole life, and on the very last day, he says, “It was true. There was a woman for me out there, and it took awhile, but I did find my way to her. No one was ever in my way but myself.”

So in this scenario, Finn has proved the belief true. Now, let’s consider the alternative. Finn lives out his whole life, and on the very last day, he says, “It’s false. There was never a woman for me in this world. I never found her, and I’m not the one to blame. Women are to blame—and the men they choose to be with! They’re the ones in my way! The world is to blame for my failure!” In this scenario, has Finn proved the belief false? No. What if the right girl did exist but he just never found her?

So what does all of this mean? Earlier I said this belief had to be true to clear the mind of resentment: /there’s a place in this world, and a way to that place, for everyone which can’t be denied by anyone except for themselves/. And this is a belief that you can prove true for your own life, but you can /never/ prove it false. And I think that means, ultimately, that resentment is a choice. And this is a point I really wanna hammer home.

When you read the manifestos of people like Finn, people who do really atrocious things to the world, you can see they’re resentful. And they often say something that amounts to, “things could’ve been different, if you, the world, didn’t make me resentful.” And I think this part is false. No one can make you resentful. You have to decide whether the world has a place for you, a place which no one can deny you but yourself, and then you have to dedicate your whole life to that search.

And at the end of your life, you can say that you never found that place, but you can never say that it didn’t exist. Because it’s impossible to prove that it doesn’t exist. Or you can reject the idea that there’s a place for you in this world, and you can become resentful towards the people you think stand in your way, but then you have to be honest with yourself: this is a choice you are making for yourself. No one can make you resentful but yourself.

Resentment arises from a voluntary abandonment of faith in the world—a voluntary abandonment of hope. And although I talked about resentment in a very specific context, I could’ve used hundreds of different examples. I could’ve written about a woman who becomes resentful towards men, or a boss to their employee, or an employee to their boss, or a parent to their kid, or a kid to their parents, and so on. But I believe the mechanics of resentment operate the same in all situations: a voluntary abandonment of faith in the world leads to entitlement, rejected entitlement leads to frustration, and an accumulation of frustration leads to resentment.

So the key to stopping resentment is to never lose hope in the world. So let me leave you with this. From 1942 to 1945, Viktor Frankl was imprisoned in various concentration camps. In these years, not only had he lost his freedom, but he lost his father, his mother, and his wife to these camps. Witnessing all the cruelty, humiliation, and atrocities around him, Frankl had every reason to lose hope. But he never did.

In fact, in his bestselling book /Man’s Search for Meaning/, he wrote, “everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.” He reaffirmed the idea that even in the worst of circumstances, when all seems lost, we can still hold on to hope, and we still retain a power that no one, and I mean /no one/, can rob us of.

Even in the darkest situations, we hold a light within us that can ward off the all-consuming shadows of resentment, but we must choose to harness that light, and we must choose not to surrender to the shadow. As always, this is just my opinion, understanding, and interpretation of some of Nietzsche’s ideas, not advice. If you liked the video, please consider liking the video. And if you’re looking for another Nietzsche video to watch after this one, I recommend watching my video “Nietzsche - Beware of People Playing the Victim.” I’ll put a link to it in the description below and in the top right of the screen right now.