Triumph of the Human Spirit

In a world flooded with endless advice, the new church is everywhere and nowhere at once, with no priests and countless sermons. People flock to ideas, cling to diets, regimens, and lifestyles that promise to give their lives meaning, blindly following like the faithful once followed the word of Gods.

The Ray Peat crowd on Twitter, the countless diet & wellness influencers, the self-improvement business gurus in every corner of the internet. They all preach a gospel, swearing their way is the way. They sit online, trading tips, debating minutiae, endlessly adding or subtracting to perfect themselves, all while the world itself remains complete untouched by their existence.

This dogma you see online, no matter what guise it wears, demands obedience. It shuts down any opening to question or explore. It lulls you into believing you’re making progress when you’re just running in place. “This is how you should live, this is what you should eat, this is how to be happy.”

But what freedom is there in shackling yourself to an ideology? A person can just as easily trap themselves in diets and motivational checklists as they can in a cathedral.

The sad irony of it all is that the very people who claim to be liberated through their chosen lifestyle are often more bound than those who never adhered to anything at all.

You see it in those who evangelize their diet, their spirituality, their routines, as though they’re clutching the one universal key to life’s mysteries. Yet, where are the creations, the risks, the boldness that should arise from this supposed liberation? Where are the works that reflect a life lived fully, fearlessly, that will stand the test of time?

All I see are people huddled around the glow of screens, forever fine-tuning, forever tweaking.

To transcend this, we have to remember what Nietzsche’s “will to power” really means. It’s not about following. It’s about breaking from the herd, tearing free from reliance on any dogma, secular or sacred. It’s about a spirit so charged with its own life force that it pushes forward, not out of compulsion but out of a fierce, internal drive. The power of the human spirit, at its peak, doesn’t seek validation or instruction. It doesn’t need permission or praise. It doesn’t compromise. It carves its own way through the world, creating, defining, manifesting not because it was taught to do so, but because it’s compelled from within.

Look at the so-called degenerates, the ones who should, by all accounts, be worn out, broken, or irrelevant by now. People like John McAfee, a man who lived life on the edge of chaos, drifting between brilliance and mania, all while keeping a relentless momentum.

Or John Daly, a walking middle finger to health advice, with his chain-smoking, hard-drinking, hard-living ways, who could still swing a golf club with unmatched power and finesse, outlasting so many squeaky-clean athletes half his age.

Then there's the much reviled Donald Trump, a figure who defies every rule of political decorum and convention, navigating scandal after scandal, somehow always landing back on his feet, seemingly fuelled by pure self-belief.

These people, whatever else you might think of them, break every rule of how a person “should” live, yet they operate with more energy, resilience, and staying power than those who blindly follow every piece of lifestyle advice out there.

Their existence alone is a testament to something deeper, something that can’t be bottled or prescribed. They are imperfect, they are chaotic, they are often at odds with the very fabric of society, but they move. They push forward when, by all conventional standards, they should be in decline.

For all their flaws, they possess a will to live on their own terms, an indomitable spirit that seems to feed on adversity. They are proof that energy, vitality, and force of will aren’t at all tied to clean living or routines. It’s something primal, something internal. A fire that defies logic, that runs laps around those who live by the rulebook, as if to show that it’s the force inside you that matters, not the rules you follow.

Resume padders, keyboard monkeys, and lifestyle gurus cling to their meticulously crafted illusions of competence, blind to a truth that history has always whispered: the most powerful and important figures often defied the polished standards they hold so dear.

These titans of impact were deeply flawed, blindly reckless, and even, by conventional metrics, incompetent. They didn’t ascend through spotless resumes or flawless execution. They stumbled, broke rules, and embraced their imperfections, harnessing their raw, unfiltered humanity to reshape the world. Genius, as history proves time and again, isn’t born from sanitized perfection; it thrives in the chaos of bold, unapologetic individuality.

This is what one should aim for: the knowledge that human potential isn’t neatly packaged, that it doesn’t have to follow any template. There’s an immense power within each of us that defies convention, a spirit that can withstand, adapt, and overcome. And that’s all we need to break free from the noise, from the doctrines and diets and empty promises. Not a perfectly curated lifestyle, but an iron will, a relentless drive to carve out our own path. Messy, flawed, and profoundly alive.

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