Are Your Ideals Just a Waste of Time?

“He who cannot find the way to his ideal, lives more frivolously and shamelessly than the man without an ideal.” -Nietzsche (Beyond Good and Evil, aphorism 133)

I think what Nietzsche’s getting at in this quote is a lack of thoughtfulness in our ideals. A man who continuously chases after his ideal without a plan to get there or even a goal, wastes his time. Whereas a man who doesn’t have an ideal does not waste his time chasing after something he’ll never find.

Sometimes, if you cannot find the way to an ideal that you have, you may want to question whether that is truly your ideal or not. If something is really your ideal, you’ll have the motivation and ambition to go all out to achieve it.

At the end of the day, we need to decide for ourselves what our individual ideals are in life and strive towards them.

And if we don’t have any ideal presently to strive towards, just enjoy life. Life will be more enjoyable.