Would I live my life again?
The question usually turns up late at night or after a birthday. If I could go back, would I do it the same way? It sounds like a question about regret, and most answers treat it that way.
Friedrich Nietzsche asked a stricter version in The Gay Science (1882), known in Thomas Common's translation as The Joyful Wisdom. He left out the option of doing it differently.
The demon
Section 341 of the book is titled "The Heaviest Burden". A demon comes to you in your loneliest hour and says that this life, exactly as you live it, will return again and again, every pain and every joy, in the same order. Nietzsche then asks how you would take it: would you curse the demon, or call it a god?
He cares less about the cosmology than about what the thought would do to a person who took it seriously:
"Dost thou want this once more, and also for innumerable times?"
— Friedrich Nietzsche, The Joyful Wisdom, tr. Thomas Common, book IV, § 341
That question, he writes, would lie as the heaviest burden upon one's actions.
Not the past, the next step
The phrasing matters. The weight falls on "thy activity": on what a person is doing, not on what they once did. The demon does not review a finished life. It tests the next choice.
Nobody can re-choose last year. But anyone can notice, today, that they are doing something they would never agree to repeat, and are doing it anyway.
The page on feeling like you're wasting your life is about a life measured by other people's standards. This one is about consent: whether I would sign my name under what I am doing now.
What the demon leaves
Nietzsche does not require the answer to be yes. He leaves a question: what in my life now would I refuse to repeat, and why do I go on with it?
Epimelea is an app built around the existential school. The conversation carries over from one meeting to the next. The archive is encrypted on the device and belongs to the person who wrote it.
About the app: an AI therapist for long-term therapy
This page is about a school of psychotherapy. It is not medical advice and not emergency help. If you are in danger right now, contact your local emergency number, or find a helpline in your country at findahelpline.com.