Special Guest Blogger: Friedrich Nietzsche

I started my academic career as a classical philologist, a fancy term for someone who pretends that deciphering ancient Greek syntax is a proper job and at 24 I was appointed Professor of Classical Philology at Basel which is an achievement that sounds impressive until you realise that I spent my twenties translating Homer.
My love affair with the ancient Greeks was short-lived due to a combination of chronic health problems and the sheer absurdity of explaining it’s all a myth to undergraduates which finally prompted my resignation. I left the ivory tower for a less structured life of independent writing, which, in practical terms, meant solitude, financial insecurity, and a relentless quest for a climate that wouldn’t make my head explode from my crippling migraines.
Hopping between Switzerland, Italy, and southern France, not for leisure but because each new climate promised a possible cure for my headaches and indigestion but during this decade, I completed most of my core writing including an essays that would later be quoted by every student who wanted to appear deep at a coffee shop.
When I first scribbled 'God is dead' in The Gay Science  it was less a bold proclamation and more a shorthand for the cultural shift I observed of scientific breakthroughs and secularisation which were rendering the Abrahamic God, the ancient source of Western meaning and value, metaphorically obsolete, a cosmetic removal of the divine billboard that once dominated the intellectual highway.
Aged 44, I was having a mental breakdown and two policemen approached me after I caused a public disturbance in the streets of Turin after seeing a horse being flogged so I ran to embrace it, and collapsed dead in the aftermath.
What i have noticed is since my death the world has taken my work on a joyride but my intention was not to provide cheap motivational sound-bites but to challenge my contemporaries and future generations to confront the vacuum left by a dying metaphysical framework and to create one’s own values.
The next time you feel the crushing weight of meaninglessness, remember that the very notion of meaning is a human construction, one you can sculpt, smash, or rewrite while wearing a flamboyant t-shirt that reads 'God is dead'.