Hello everyone, I'm Stephen West. This is Philosophies this. Thank you for the patience.

By the way, patreon.com slash philosophies this big thank you to all 450 of you that make

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You can find that banner on philosophies this.org. Today's episode is about Nietzsche and his often

misinterpreted notion of the will to power. I hope you love the show today.

So last episode we talked a lot about what we shouldn't be doing. We talked about Nietzsche,

we talked about his psychological analysis of the average person and how easy it is to convince

yourself to believe in something or to do something that isn't the most accurate necessarily,

but nonetheless it fills some sort of deep psychological void that you may have.

But instead of talking about what you shouldn't be doing, let's talk about what you should be doing.

And a pretty good introspective launching point for having this discussion is to ask yourself the

following question. Why do you do what you do? What is the primary psychological motivation for

whatever it is that you do? When you're at any given decision point, there's a million different

things you could do. What are you specifically trying to accomplish when you're choosing the one

you're actually going to do? There's a lot of different answers to this. A really common one when

you talk to people, a very Aristotelian approach to the question is that whenever somebody's doing something,

they ultimately are doing it because they think it's going to bring them happiness. Whatever you're

doing, ultimately, somewhere deep down you believe that it will make you happy. Now some people argue

with this. No, that's not me. No. No, forget my happiness. My life is about sacrifice. My life is

about serving other people. I have 11 children. I volunteer down at the soup kitchen. In fact,

I often find myself just driving around the city looking for old ladies standing by a busy

...