EMBRACE LIMITS

Nietzsche was the first philosopher of limits.

Earth's gravity limits how high we can jump, but this doesn’t mean the void of space provides better living conditions. The horizon limits how far the sailor can see, but no ship can sail without the horizon. Incidentally, Gravity and Horizon are also Nietzsche’s metaphor for God

When Nietzsche announced the death of God, he announced the disappearance of our moral gravity and intellectual horizon. He saw that limitless freedom would be, above all, disorienting. Right from his first book, he’d been writing about how limits are a friend to life…

A living body has limits, a dead body does not. Every animal strictly defends its border - its skin. Try playfully poking a tiger and see what happens. A tiger’s corpse, on the other hand, allows free traffic to the elements from outside. What is dead has no limits.

What limits us, empowers us. Freedom can be a false God. Great achievement is often unlocked when man’s consciousness is limited to a single goal. But Nietzsche wrote that it’s not just individuals, but entire societies, that need limits to thrive.

In The Birth Of Tragedy, Nietzsche writes: “Only a horizon ringed about with myths can unify a culture.” If a culture is not limited to a set of foundational myths, it has no common ground to stand on. People in a community need to share not just their language but their stories.

Nietzsche writes: “All living things require an atmosphere around them….a living thing can be healthy, strong and fruitful only when bounded by a horizon; if it is incapable of drawing a horizon around itself, it will pine away slowly or hasten to its timely end.”

In his essay Use and Abuse of History For Life, Nietzsche talks about the “art and power of forgetting.” Because we can forget, we can act. To do anything worthwhile requires forgetting about the past and the future. Requires limiting one’s awareness to the present moment.

In a lecture, Jordan Peterson noted that Batman is more interesting and (significantly more) lucrative than Superman. Why? Because Batman is human. He has limits. Superman has laser eyes, monster strength, God-like power - his limitless abilities actually make him a bore.

An underrated aspect of success: It’s a by-product of placing the right limitations on oneself. Winners are people who restrict themselves to favorable frameworks. They enforce a stricter set of values. They know distraction is freedom’s dark underbelly. They befriend limits.