"What if a demon were to steal after you into your loneliest loneliness... and say: This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more... Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who spoke thus? Or have you once experienced a tremendous moment when you would have answered him: You are a god, and never have I heard anything more divine."
What If You Had to Run This Business Forever?
Nietzsche's idea of the eternal recurrence is not a productivity framework. It doesn't belong in a slide deck or a self-help book. It's a metaphysical provocation, a pressure test for the soul. But take it out of its native habitat and run it across the grain of the builder, and it gives us something else: a harsh // clarifying lens on design, intention, and endurance.
What if you had to run your company again and again, endlessly?
Not grow it. Not exit. Not pivot into something trendier.
What if the loop closed, the future was shut off, and the only thing left was the present, repeating itself without relief?
It’s a version of a question startup founders often get wrong, or answer in bad faith.
"Would you do this if you knew it wouldn’t scale?"
"Would you work on this even if no one noticed?"
These sound noble, but they’re half-formed. Eternal recurrence doesn’t ask whether the idea is worth starting. It asks whether the idea is worth being trapped inside. Is your business designed for escape velocity - or for recurrence?
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