"Message the show"

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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"Message the show"

"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"

Support the show

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.

👉 Follow and connect:

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"Message the show"

Socrates claimed the unexamined life isn’t worth living—but Nietzsche wasn’t so sure. What if our acute self-awareness is the source of our suffering?

In this episode, we journey from the carefree contentment of grazing cattle to the haunted introspection of the modern human. We explore Nietzsche’s radical claim that consciousness is not our crowning glory but a socially evolved disease—a by-product of language, hierarchy, and domestication that alienates us from nature, from one another, and from ourselves.

We trace the emergence of consciousness as an evolutionary trade-off: a tool for collective organisation that became a prison of self-surveillance and moral guilt. Along the way, we confront the “hard problem” of consciousness from a wholly different angle—what if the problem is not the mind’s mystery, but the false metaphysics smuggled in by language itself?

Finally, we consider Nietzsche’s Dionysian remedy—a return to the primal unity beneath the illusions of thought, a dangerous dance with chaos that may cost you your “self”… but might just offer something deeper in return.

Support the show

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.

👉 Follow and connect:

Instagram | X (Twitter) | YouTube | TikTok | Facebook