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Welcome to the third and final part of the Will to Joy Season Finale. 

This episode is going to be the most momentous. We wrestle with will to power as it relates to you and to your life. You'll be faced with the most consequential question—that of the value of your own existence.

We track Nietzsche’s break from Schopenhauer’s pessimism, the shift from “will to life” to “will to power,” and the emergence of Dionysus as the figure who dissolves all boundaries: between desire and fulfilment, self and world, necessity and freedom. This isn’t Greek mythology; it’s the psychological architecture of your instincts, your ambitions, and the drives you pretend not to have.

Along the way, we daly with determinism, deflate guilt and regret, and contend with Nietzsche’s most severe test. Your answer shapes the person you are right now and will become—not through choice, but through necessity.

This episode explores the exquisite tension between total acceptance of reality and the irrepressible urge to strive, to overcome, to expand, to change the world. It shows how these opposites form a single dynamic—the Dionysian duality at the heart of life itself.

If you engage wholeheartedly, you’ll come away with a new way of seeing your suffering, your desires, your past, and your future. The depths of Nietzschean thought we'll explore are not just philosophy; they offer an initiation. 

Some lessons, properly learned, cannot be unlearned. 

Some truths can be integrated only by those strong enough to bear them.

In the end, joy is the only goal that justifies itself.

Music: Kate Bush, Nocturn

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Dionysus wants to make you stronger, more evil, more profound – and more beautiful. 

In this second part of the season finale, we follow that cosmic pied piper into the heart of Nietzsche’s most explosive idea: the will to power.

Last time, we dismantled the myth of free will and showed that selection is the basic logic of reality – from molecules to memes. Now we pick up those threads and begin to trace their connection to Nietzsche’s patron deity. We explore Dionysus as the living symbol of a world without metaphysical safety nets: no God, no higher justice, no ultimate meaning – just an inexhaustible flux that delights both in creation and destruction. Greek tragedy, ecstasy, ego-death, joy in suffering: Dionysus is the world drunk on itself.

From there, we denude “will” and “power” and subject them to a thorough examination. Is a tree’s striving for light a kind of love? Does a rock “want” to fall? What if your own wanting is just a late, conscious complication of a more basic cosmic tendency? We track will from galaxies to genes to nervous systems, and power from brute survival to your everyday ambitions. 

Ultimately, we're going to expose will to power as the very machinery of existence. 

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Free will is the sacred cow of our modern civilisation. Everyone believes they have it but no one can justify this belief. 

In our season finale of The Will to Joy, we put that belief on the chopping block. I start by offering up a simple challenge: demonstrate free will. When that inevitably fails we follow the chain of consequences and travel into the deepest strata of Nietzsche’s philosophy.

This is the first part of a three part episode and it's most ambitious episode I’ve made: an odyssey from the birth of the solar system through the blind mechanics of evolution, the rise of consciousness, the illusion of choice, the social need for moral responsibility, and the psychological tricks that keep the myth of autonomy alive. Only then do can we get to the heart of it: Nietzsche’s will to power as a total theory of becoming — metaphysical, biological, psychological, and spiritual.

This isn’t a motivational gloss or a “Nietzsche for beginners” pamphlet. It’s a rigorous survey of the architecture of will to power. You’ll see why free will is a noble lie, why our institutions depend on it, why our minds fall for the illusion, and why Nietzsche thought its abandonment is the real beginning of freedom.

If you’re ready for a tour that runs from volcanic hellscapes to the chemistry of life, from memes to morality, from fumbling deliberation to Dionysus himself — lock the door. Pour a drink. Settle in.

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If you value Will to Joy (formerly Becoming Übermensch) and you want more, please ensure its continued existence by supporting the show

If you are interested in delving deeper into this work and are hungry for greater challenges, I also now have a Patreon. Become a De Profundis Member and access exclusive episodes and exercises. Thank you so much for supporting this project.

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"Message the show"

As Nietzsche writes, "he who cannot obey himself, will be commanded". The ability to obey oneself - to have an internal locus of authority rather than an external one - this is how, in our era of purported equality, a master is distinguished from a slave.

But what about you? Who or what do you obey? And, in obeying, are you compromising yourself, or are you maintaining your own integrity, your own autonomy, your own authority?

This episode in an extra recording from the Will to Joy library on Patreon. See the link below to become a member. It is published in lieu of the Will to Joy season finale which will be launched next week - look out for that! 

Music credit: strings sbh nmr b2 37 AECE.wav by ERH -- https://freesound.org/s/60981/ -- License: Attribution NonCommercial 4.0

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If you value Will to Joy (formerly Becoming Übermensch) and you want more, please ensure its continued existence by supporting the show

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Special Episode: An Economy of Bodies – Nietzsche, Sex, Beauty, and the Will to Power

This week’s episode is something different. I’m sharing the recording of my presentation at the annual Friedrich Nietzsche Society conference at Queen's University in Belfast (6th September). My paper, An Economy of Bodies, brings Nietzsche’s philosophy into dialogue with evolutionary psychology and behavioural science to explore sex, beauty, culture, social status, destiny, and what Nietzsche calls “ascending life.”

Though delivered in an academic setting, the ideas here cut straight into lived experience: why we find bodies beautiful, how our aesthetic sensibility shapes culture, and how power, desire, and valuation work at the most basic human level in our most primal impulses.

I’ll be developing this work into a concise, practical guide soon, but for now, here’s the raw presentation that set the discussion in motion.

Next episode will be our season finale released on the 26th September, slightly out of kilter with our regular schedule due to the Belfast conference. It's going to be a scorcher. Do not miss it! 

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Recorded on the rugged trails of the Lake District, with a stupidly heavy pack, sore knees, and a wild Nietzschean esprit!

In this episode, I yomp alone through across 40 miles of peaks and silence, sleeping out, drinking from streams, and thinking deeply about beauty, power, shame, and the weight we carry—both physically and psychologically.

Topics include:

– The brutality and exhilaration of hiking peak-to-peak solo

– Extracts from my upcoming paper: An Economy of Bodies — a Nietzschean genealogy of sex, beauty, and culture

– Wild camping, solitude, thirst, and suffering as spiritual practices

– Nietzsche’s “Spirit of Gravity”: what drags us down—prudence, shame, herd morality—and how to achieve escape velocity

– Naked dancing under the crescent moon, and the politics of “cringe”

– Why true confidence means an internal locus of authority

This is not a travel diary. It’s a philosophical field recording. Wind rumbling the mic, scrambling on stone, a fire crackling in a remote bothy—and the sound of one man wrestling with the joyless forces of anti-life.

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If you value Will to Joy (formerly Becoming Übermensch) and you want more, please ensure its continued existence by supporting the show

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This week on the Will to Joy podcast – Can suffering be more than something to endure? Nietzsche thought so. 

In a world obsessed with comfort, safety, and minimising pain, he argued for the discipline of great suffering as the forge of strength, depth, and creativity. We explore the difference between meaningless and meaningful pain, the dangers of a life anaesthetised from hardship, and how struggle feeds the will to power. From Greek tragedy to modern grief, we ask: can suffering be not only accepted, but honoured—even made sacred?

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If you value Will to Joy (formerly Becoming Übermensch) and you want more, please ensure its continued existence by supporting the show

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We continue our discussion of Nietzschean self-overcoming and explore a range of techniques for changing behaviour that scientific evidence tells us work.

You will descend into the world of Nietzsche’s drives psychology and discover that each of us is inhabited by a rabble of unruly drives all competing for expression. Their jostling causes us confusion about what we really want from life and hinders our attempts to get it. You will discover that the noise created by these battling drives is also the basis of all our thoughts and feelings and it even constitutes what we believe to be our unified sense of self.

You will learn how these drives are managed and organised through the construction of positive choice architecture to make the right thing to do the easy thing to do. And you will be introduced to a suite of behaviour change techniques that are proven to be highly effective in improving your self-control—including a couple of lessons from the ancient world. 

Learn to cultivate yourself like a professional and turn that chaotic wasteland into a beautiful, fertile, burgeoning garden. 

🎧 Music: I want to be alone, by Jackson C. Frank

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Why Won’t You Do What You Want You to Do?

You know what you want. You want to be fitter, healthier, stronger, more focused, more creative. You want to stop scrolling, quit drinking, wake up earlier, stop saying yes to people who don’t deserve it. 

And yet—you don’t do it.

Why?

In this episode, we explore the tension between desire and action, reason and impulse, intention and failure. We delve into the fragmentary and conflicting human psyche to understand how self-control is acheived. Through the story of a colleague who couldn’t implement a simple behaviour change, we open up the deeper question of self-overcoming. 

Drawing on Nietzsche’s drives-psychology and my two decades working in behaviour change services, I explore why it feels like we are at war with ourselves—and why, in Nietzsche’s view, that’s exactly what we are.

We’ll challenge the myth of willpower, examine Nietzsche's own theory of self-help, and ask what it means to bring a noble order to the chaos of the self. 

This is the beginning of a two-part deep dive into Nietzsche, habit, conflict, and the science of personal transformation.

Music: Rockets Fall on Rocket Falls by Godspeed you! Black Emperor

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"The degree and kind of a man's sexuality reaches up into the topmost summit of his spirit." 

Beyond Good and Evil, 75

In this episode, we begin with a plunge into the sacred animality of the body: sensation, desire, and the ecstatic collapse of self into the immediacy of flesh. 

From there, we spiral outward—into vignettes of shame, overcompensation, resentment, and neurosis. Fatness, baldness, shortness, beauty, disability, disease, all the contingencies of anatomy—these are not unimportant surface-level traits; they are our lived reality. They endow power or confiscate it. They elicit pity or admiration. They twist the mind or harden the will.

Are we anything more than our bodies? Nietzsche doubted it—and in this episode, we take him at his word. Exploring how physique and physiology shape identity, quality of life, and destiny. We ask: What does it mean to strive toward Nietzsche’s ideal of “the great health”? Can we come to love fate—even when our fate is written into our very substance?

This is not self-help. It’s the ultimate existential challenge. To embrace your body. To train it. To understand it. To be grateful for it. And above all, to affirm it and the world of which it is a necessary and inextricable component.

Music: Death is Eternal Bliss by ELEH

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Music credit in intro: ViraMillar on Freesound - "Music by UNIVERSFIELD from Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/c/UNIVERSFIELD"

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