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Heh. I actually channeled this in my writing without even having read Nietzsche. Turns out if there's no real reward for effort, no sapient being will exert it. Change that and you change the man.

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I don't know, I think it's much simpler, the mental health crisis: these people have no principles. They don't have any whys, and as Nietzsche said, if you have a why, you can bear any how. If you don't have a why, why then, you can't bear anything.

Once you have principles you can do hard things, and will likely be called by your principles to do hard things. But I'm not sure if doing hard things is a way to get some principles.

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I have way to many principles, Carlos. And still suffering from mental health.

I do agree with the premise of trying to do hard things, and trying to achieve them.

But mental health is much more then lack of direction in life or not having principles. Is it a result of mental health? Definitely.

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Well, I'm just remembering from when mental health used to be an issue for me. I ended up in a psych ward with suicidal depression purely because of a really toxic conception of masculinity I had internalized. So I guess it wasn't so much no principles as bad principles.

Ultimately, reality truly is what you make of it. But that can be difficult to see if one's north is pointing south, or one has no north at all.

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Of course I don't have principles. No one is forcing me to, and having principles is in itself hard and difficult. You will notice that most of the people do hard and difficult things because there is something forcing them, not because they want to. I do not mean literal physical coercion, for example, it could just be that they would find it unbearable if other people would have a low opinion of them. In the absence of some forcing, hard and difficult things like forming principles does not happen.

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It is thrilling to discover your principles. They are a great source of power. No one forced me to discover mine.

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