Nietzsche's Eternal Recurrence is Hellish

[Óttar]

I don't care for Nietzsche's concept of Ewige Wiederkehr or Eternal Recurrence. Someone once explained to me that if I think that E.R. is hellish then I must be living a hellish life. I think if our lifetimes are just like the movie Groundhog Day then this is completely pointless. Even more so than the inherent meaninglessness of things being stuck on a tiny rock in one of billions of billions of galaxies.

I suspect Nietzsche proposed E.R. as a kind of rhetorical device or philosophical tool rather than a metaphysical supposition, but I find it disturbing. Only experiencing Hugh Heffner or Genghis Khan's life would make E.R. remotely worth it.

Of course, no one has any empirical proof for E.R. so it is just as much woo-woo as any theological speculation.

[ApollonianGerm]

I find it to be the most serene and comforting thought imaginable. I get to re-live the warmth of my childhood, the excitement of my first love-- every triumph and defeat, every rise and fall of my life... and in repeating I get to experience it with the exact same freshness and novelty as I did the very first time... every repetition is a "first time". What more could one ask for ?