Derek Thompson

Don't be who external systems of values want you to be.

Be the kind of person that is most authentic and even playful and artful that you can possibly muster.

And in a way, what you're doing without being, I think, explicitly Nietzschean is saying, let's have more art.

Let's have more play.

Let's have more instinct.

Let's have a class whose grading is determined by the instincts of the class and not determined by the administration that I happen to be employed by.

Don't be played by the metrics and the games that you find yourself sort of fallen into.

Develop your own sense of what is valuable to you and play that game that you choose.

And so I guess I wonder...

And again, I might completely regret ending the podcast this way.

I wonder even if you completely disagree with my summary of an aspect of Nietzsche, whether that too is a way of grasping at what you want is a reemergence of instinct which comes from the self and cannot possibly come from a metric or from the rules of some game that we've fallen into.

That was a beautiful answer.

I don't know that I can summarize it because I'm pathologically obsessed with summarizing things.

I'm going to try anyway.

It seems to me like you're saying that perhaps not the meaning of life, but a meaning of life is both the individual cultivation of a value system and the day-by-day struggle, chosen struggle, to live by it.

Yeah.

But you need both.

You need to be both the author of the value system, the author of...

the game, so to speak, and the person who chooses day after day after day after day to play by its rules.

Yeah.