This Year, I’m Becoming a Philosopher 🗳️

LIFE ON URTH - Episode 083

It’s 2026 — Happy New Year!

This beginning always feels to me like the strike of a gigantic bell tower, measuring time in years. It’s an invitation to pause, orient, and realign. This time, the theme that emerged for me was identity.

When Atomic Habits was published in 2018, I was still in medical school and felt rather overwhelmed by James Clear’s encouragement to build good habits around an identity. According to this idea, you shouldn’t try to make yourself read — you should become a reader. Through small behavioral changes, you cast votes for a new identity. The process can be simplified further by attaching new habits to existing ones (for example, reading one page after brushing your teeth).

That all sounds convincing — as long as you can agree on what you actually want to become. This is one of my biggest creative hurdles. Of course, I want to be a blogger and author. But also a psychotherapeutic physician, a musician across different genres, a DJ, a podcaster, a YouTuber… How am I supposed to choose from such a vast selection of exciting identities?

Right in the middle of this process, I began reading excerpts from Nietzsche. A small vote for my still tiny “Nietzsche-knower” identity! I didn’t get very far because two short paragraphs on the first page suddenly brought calm, then clarity and light into my inner landscape. In the first passage, all inner harshness melted away and was replaced by curiosity and anticipation for the process:

Forward on the path of wisdom, with good pace and good trust! Whatever you are, serve yourself as a source of experience! Cast off displeasure with your being, forgive yourself your own self: for in every case you have in yourself a ladder with a hundred rungs, on which you can climb to knowledge. (1)

With this newly found courage, I returned to the search for an identity and stepped toward the unknown. The next passage, therefore, met an open mind — and a seed that had long been germinating:

The product of the philosopher is his life (first, before his works). That is his work of art.

All at once, it became clear to me which central identity I want to organize my everyday life around: that of the philosopher. This isn’t actually a new idea for me, but I had never seen it formulated so densely as in these two sentences attributed to Nietzsche. (2)

This idea — of seeing one’s own life as the most important creative project — reaches me again and again from different sources. It was also a central element of the most formative books I read in 2025. The Pathless Path, for example, encourages a completely different approach to work. Instead of having money and career at the core, it's emphasizing the probably most important resource in life: our relationships.

Even in my medical-psychotherapeutic training and work, a great deal revolves around shaping life in the spirit of creativity. One core idea of cognitive-behavioral therapy (the therapeutic school of my training) is to approach challenges with curiosity, thereby creating new experiences. From there to art, only communication with others is missing — and there is plenty of that in therapy as well.

For over 80 weeks now, I’ve been observing myself as I write this newsletter. Over time, a few thematic areas crystallized that I find useful and haven’t grown tired of yet: psychology, meditation, productivity, and questions of consciousness.

Only now, however, have I understood what all these topics have in common. At heart, I’m always concerned with the question of what the best version of myself looks like — and how I can move toward it. In my view, this aligns closely with Immanuel Kant’s fundamental questions of philosophy:

What can I know?
What should I do?
What may I hope?

In 2026, I’ll be working on casting votes for my new identity as a philosopher. I don’t plan or expect this to displace my more established identities. Rather, I want to complement my currently somewhat chaotic identity system with a structuring center — one that helps me with orientation and decision-making:

Welcome to your philosophy newsletter (accompanied by themes from psychology, meditation, productivity, and questions of consciousness 😛)!

Which identity do you want to cast votes for in 2026? 🗳️

Quote (1): Friedrich Nietzsche — Human, All Too Human
Regarding quote (2), my research showed that it doesn’t come verbatim from Nietzsche but is a “paraphrasing condensation” of a central Nietzschean motif. So: thank you to the unknown paraphraser!

✒️ Quote of the Week: “The more you experience your mind at its best - at its most open and clear - the more you'll notice your failure to truly live from that place.” -Sam Harris

🎧 Song of the Week: Elfenberg - Mozambique

I want to expand the format of this newsletter by responding to comments or questions from readers.
Of course, I’ll need some comments and questions first 😂 So I’d love to hear from you!

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All the best,

Adrian / Urth

Can’t wait until next week’s edition? Check out my essays.