People throw around Nietzsche quotes like he’s some edgy Instagram philosopher, “God is dead,” “He who has a why can bear any how,” or that favorite about monsters and staring into the abyss. But most don’t read him. Not really. They treat him like a playlist shuffle, pulling one line out of Thus Spoke Zarathustra or Beyond Good and Evil and thinking they’ve captured the man.

When I took philosophy in college, Nietzsche was my gateway drug. He didn’t ask for blind agreement, he demanded confrontation. His writing felt like a dare: to think harder, deeper, more honestly. He made me question everything: God, morality, free will, even my own intentions. For some reason, that stuff just clicked with me. I know, not exactly what people expected from a dance scholar who wore eyeliner like war paint and could glide across the stage in full Maria Clara attire without missing a beat. But yeah, I’m a geek. The kind who read The Gay Science backstage between quick changes, scribbled thoughts on Ecce Homo in the margins of my notes, and somehow found comfort in what most people would simply call chaos. He wasn’t just an academic name to me, he was a voice that made me feel seen before I even knew how to explain myself.

From then until now, every time I mention Nietzsche or throw in a line from his works, I get looks. Sometimes curious. Sometimes confused. Occasionally glazed over. That’s okay. I don’t bring them up to sound clever, I bring them up because they still speak to me, especially in the messiness of adulthood. Because parenting, marriage, grief, failure, and even joy, they’re all full of contradictions. And no one explained contradictions quite like he did.

People often misinterpret Nietzsche. And I get it, he’s hard to pin down. But maybe that’s the point. He never asked to be understood in a glance. He asked to be read. To be sat with. To be struggled through. And maybe that’s what frustrates people most, they want clarity. Nietzsche gives them a mirror.

Take “God is dead.” People treat it as a bold atheist statement, but they miss the existential weight behind it. It’s not a victory cry, it’s a funeral. Nietzsche was grieving the collapse of meaning, the unraveling of moral certainty, and warning us that the freedom we inherit comes with a heavy burden: the responsibility to create new values.

And the thing about Nietzsche is you can’t really understand him by reading just one book. You have to read through him, across him, and often back to him. You start with one work, then move to another, and somewhere along the way you realize the second book sends you circling back to the first. The connections only begin to reveal themselves when you’re willing to reread, reflect, and sit with the discomfort. What he meant isn’t always obvious; it unfolds over time, across texts, and sometimes between the lines.

And that’s precisely why Nietzsche remains one of the most misinterpreted thinkers in history because we try to extract meaning from fragments. We take a single sentence and treat it as a full thesis. But Nietzsche’s ideas weren’t meant to be cherry-picked; they were part of an evolving, often self-contradictory dialogue that demands context, patience, and humility. Fragments can spark interest, yes, but they rarely carry the full weight of what was meant.

And the truth is, we still do this now, not just with philosophers, but with people. We judge from slivers of information, headlines, soundbites, social media captions, fleeting impressions. We decide who someone is based on what they post, how they speak, or one thing they once said. It’s easier that way. But it’s also a form of intellectual laziness and often, injustice.

As a mother of four, I’ve experienced the world’s tendency to reduce people to moments. When you’re raising four kids, it’s easy for people to judge your choices based on fragments; a tired face at school drop-off, a rushed answer during a parent-teacher meeting, or the quiet exhaustion that follows a day spent balancing everyone else’s needs, those are the moments people notice. What they don’t see are the long nights sitting by a child’s bedside, the unseen emotional labor, or the countless times you put your own plans on hold for someone else’s well-being.

We live in a world that moves too fast for nuance, a world obsessed with instant takes and oversimplified truths. People, like ideas, are often reduced to soundbites, memes, or passing impressions. We scroll, skim, and assume, rarely pausing to consider the full story. But if studying philosophy taught me anything, it’s that truth resists shortcuts. It rarely reveals itself in headlines or highlights. Real understanding requires time to sit with contradictions, to make space for ambiguity, and to resist the urge to resolve tension too quickly. Whether it’s the work of a thinker or the life of a person, meaning unfolds gradually. You have to read the whole book, sometimes more than once. You have to linger in the uncomfortable parts. Because that’s where the real insight lives, not in the certainty, but in the struggle to make sense of it all.

So here’s a little friendly advice: if you’re going to quote Nietzsche, read him. Not a thread. Not a meme. Not a Pinterest pin. Read the text. Wrestle with it. Let it confuse you. Let it offend you. Then go back and read it again, because chances are, what you thought he meant was only the surface. Nietzsche doesn’t hand out truths. He hands out tension. And only those willing to stay in the tension begin to understand the point.

And if you’re going to judge people, do them the same courtesy. Don’t reduce someone’s story to a single chapter, a bad day, a mistake, or a snapshot online. Like Nietzsche, people are layered, contradictory, evolving, often misunderstood when rushed, only meaningful when read with care. If you won’t read the whole book, at least admit that you’re skimming. But don’t mistake your highlight reel for their truth.

Love,

Ana 💋