Reply To: More Freedom – What you believe you are vs. what you believe you "should" be
Trumanim sure this “shoulding” thing is related to the freudian super ego
it also has a nietzschean sense to it.
I had become a camel, of sorts, by allowing my naive quest for knowledge and wisdom to lead me into the darkest and most disturbing corners of existence. Perhaps we inevitably become camels when we take on the labor of philosophical thinking. Eager to prove ourselves capable of embracing the truth, we seek out the heaviest and most burdensome insights, and force ourselves to dwell on them as a rite of passage. “What is heavy? Thus asks the weight-bearing spirit; thus it kneels down like the camel and wants to be well laden.” Nietzsche describes the camel spirit as a collector of burdens, conquests, and scars. The camel asks: “What is heaviest … that I may take it upon me and rejoice in my strength” (Z, 54).
Camels can carry great weights and survive in the desert. But the weighted individual is inevitably taxed by their burden. Over time, they run the risk of being poisoned by bitterness, despair, and the spirit of revenge. If the camel does not become a lion, the seeker will be ruined by their quest. It is always in the “loneliest desert [that] a second metamorphosis occurs, the spirit here becomes a lion; it wants to capture freedom and be lord in its own desert”. This is a fair description of the metamorphosis that I underwent in my university years, which were a thrilling period of self-discovery and actualization.