
“This is the farthest human wisdom goes: The man who earns his freedom every day, alone deserves it, and no other does.”
– Goethe
Goethe might as well have slapped us.
Think about it: every day, you’ve got to claw your way up just to feel like you’ve earned a single ounce of freedom.
Not political freedom—nobody’s debating the Bill of Rights here.
He’s talking about something more primal, more private, and more terrifying: the kind of freedom that means you’ve looked at yourself in the mirror and didn’t immediately want to punch the glass.
I read that quote after a night of cheap pizza and bad decisions. My apartment smelled like despair and takeout noodles, and I had a hangover that felt like it was earning its own freedom in my skull.
My copy of Faust sat open on the couch like a bad omen, and those words hit me like a fist to the gut.
You don’t get freedom for free, Goethe was saying. Not from society, not from your job, not even from yourself.
You’ve got to earn it every single day, and if you’re not sweating, you’re not free.
Faust, Goethe’s tragic protagonist, is the poster boy for dissatisfaction. He’s read the books, done the work, mastered his field, and yet, he’s empty.
So he strikes a deal with Mephistopheles—a contract with the devil himself—just to feel alive.
What Goethe is telling us is that freedom isn’t some state of being you arrive at; it’s the struggle itself that counts.
This ties into Kierkegaard, who said that anxiety is the dizziness of freedom. It’s a battle against the nothingness that threatens to consume you.
And Nietzsche—always ready with a gut punch—chimed in with, “It is the business of the very few to be independent; it is a privilege of the strong.”
For Nietzsche, freedom is the purview of those who can bear the weight of creating meaning in a meaningless world.
But what does this look like for the rest of us?
I remember working as a copywriter, churning out soul-numbing taglines for corporate nonsense.
“Freedom” was just another buzzword to be slapped on a billboard. But at night, when the deadlines faded and the whiskey kicked in, I’d write for myself—stories that nobody would read. That was my little rebellion, my daily shot at earning something resembling freedom. It wasn’t much, but it kept me sane.

Chasing Shadows
A few years ago, I quit my stable job to “find myself.” Yeah, I became one of those people—the kind who say, “I just need some time to figure things out,” and then proceed to drown themselves in overpriced coffee and existential dread.
I bought a backpack, packed it with too many books and too few socks, and hit the road like some half-baked Kerouac wannabe.
I traveled. I read philosophy. I scribbled in journals, underlined Nietzsche like he was going to save me, and told myself I was writing a novel—though most days, I just stared at the page, hoping the words would appear on their own.
But no matter where I went, no matter how much booze I poured into the void, the same damn question followed me like a stray dog: What the hell am I doing?
One night in Berlin, I stumbled into a bar that smelled like cigarettes and low IQ decisions. It was the kind of place where nobody judges you for drinking alone.
I met a guy there—a street artist with paint-stained fingers and eyes that looked older than his face. He told me he lived out of a van parked a few blocks away.
“I earn my freedom every day,” he said, lighting a cigarette with a shaky hand. “By painting. By creating something from nothing.”
I envied him at first. There he was, living the life most people only dream about—no boss, no clock to punch, no nine-to-five soul-sucking grind.
He didn’t answer to anyone but himself. But then I looked closer, and I saw it: the exhaustion in his eyes, the kind that no amount of sleep can fix.
He wasn’t free, not really. His freedom wasn’t some utopia he’d reached; it was a daily war, a grind against the world’s indifference.
Every brushstroke was a battle. Every painting was a scream into the void, begging for someone—anyone—to notice. He wasn’t just earning his freedom; he was clawing for it, bleeding for it. And the worst part? The world didn’t care.
We sat there in silence for a while, drinking cheap beer and sharing the kind of unspoken understanding that only comes from two people equally lost in their own lives.
He had his van and his paint; I had my notebook and my bullshit dreams of writing something great. Neither of us was winning, but at least we were still in the fight.
That night, as I stumbled back to whatever hostel I’d booked, I couldn’t stop thinking about him. Maybe freedom isn’t some grand prize you win at the end of the race. Maybe it’s just the act of running itself, no matter how tired you get, no matter how many times you want to quit.
It’s the fight that keeps you alive, even when the world doesn’t give a damn whether you’re standing or lying in the gutter.
The next morning, I woke up with a notebook full of incoherent scribbles. “Keep fighting,” I’d written in shaky handwriting, underlined three times. I didn’t know what it meant then, and maybe I still don’t.
But that’s the thing about chasing shadows—you don’t have to catch them to keep moving.

A Comparison to Ligotti’s The Conspiracy Against the Human Race
Thomas Ligotti, in The Conspiracy Against the Human Race, doesn’t just take Goethe’s noble vision of freedom and reject it—he drags it down into the blackest pit of despair and leaves it there to rot.
Goethe’s idea of “earning freedom every day” is a heroic struggle, but Ligotti would see it as the ultimate cosmic farce.
Why bother striving for freedom, Ligotti seems to ask, when the very idea of striving is just another way to pass the time until we die?
Ligotti doesn’t just question freedom; he questions existence itself. To him, consciousness is a cruel cosmic accident, a glitch in the system that cursed us with the ability to suffer.
“The pessimist’s credo,” he writes, “is that nonexistence never hurt anyone and existence hurts everyone.”
On days when the world feels like it’s pressing down on your chest, it’s hard not to nod along.
While Goethe’s Faust fights for meaning, Ligotti’s worldview suggests that meaning is the bait on a trap.
Our attempts to find purpose, he argues, are as futile as trying to hold back the tide with a teaspoon. You can fight all you want, but the water’s still coming for you. It’s not just nihilism—it’s nihilism on steroids, with a smirk that says, “Good luck, sucker.”
Ligotti’s writing is like a dark alley you don’t want to walk down but can’t seem to avoid. He doesn’t sugarcoat it. Striving, freedom, meaning—these aren’t noble pursuits to him; they’re just distractions.
“The only value of consciousness,” he suggests, “is that it allows us to realize how terrible it is to be conscious.”
It’s the kind of thing that makes you want to crawl back into bed and pull the covers over your head.
I’ll admit, I’ve had my Ligotti days.
Days when the weight of everything made Goethe’s call to arms feel ridiculous.
On one particularly grim morning, I found myself sitting in a coffee shop, staring blankly at my notebook, thinking about Ligotti’s assertion that “existence hurts everyone.”
There was a guy across from me scrolling through his phone, completely oblivious to the world around him.
I wondered if he felt it too, this quiet ache of being alive. Or maybe he was just better at ignoring it.
Goethe’s Vision | Ligotti’s Vision |
---|---|
Freedom is earned through struggle and action. | Freedom is an illusion; action is futile. |
Meaning is created by striving against the odds. | Meaning is a trap; there is no escape. |
Life is a battle worth fighting. | Life is suffering, and nonexistence is preferable. |
Ligotti would scoff at Goethe’s call to earn freedom. For him, the very act of striving is a joke the universe plays on us—a desperate attempt to distract ourselves from the fact that we’re just meat puppets hurtling toward oblivion.
If Goethe sees Faust’s struggle as heroic, Ligotti sees it as pathetic.
But here’s the thing: Ligotti might be right. On our worst days, his grim vision feels uncomfortably close to the truth. What if all our efforts to “earn” freedom are just shadows on a wall, distractions to keep us from realizing how meaningless it all is?
And yet, even in Ligotti’s darkness, there’s something oddly liberating.
If life is meaningless, if freedom is an illusion, then maybe there’s no “right” way to live.
Maybe the struggle isn’t about winning or losing—it’s just about playing the game, even when the rules make no sense.
As Ligotti writes, “We are the only animal who knows we will die, and the only animal who laughs.”
On good days, I think the joke is worth it.
On bad days, well, I’m not so sure. But I keep going anyway, and maybe that’s the point.
Concept | Goethe’s Perspective | Ligotti’s Perspective |
---|---|---|
Freedom | A daily struggle that gives life meaning. | An illusion that masks the inherent cruelty of existence. |
Effort | Necessary for growth and fulfillment. | A pointless distraction from inevitable suffering. |
Meaning | Created through action and striving. | A fabrication to justify existence. |

Comfort vs. Struggle
Not everyone buys Goethe’s argument.
Rousseau claimed that freedom is a natural state, corrupted by society.
Orwell’s 1984 warns that the fight for freedom can lead to tyranny, as systems manipulate our desires.
Aldous Huxley, in Brave New World, suggests that most people don’t even want freedom; they prefer comfort.
Take the characters from Huxley’s dystopia: Soma-swallowing citizens who trade liberty for happiness.
Or Winston Smith from 1984, whose quest for freedom ends in a prison of the mind.
These stories challenge Goethe’s idea by showing the cost of striving—sometimes it’s too high.
Final Words for The Crying Souls
So, what does it all mean? If Goethe is right, freedom is a constant battle.
If Ligotti is right, it’s a pointless one.
Somewhere between these two extremes lies the truth: freedom is neither guaranteed nor meaningless.
It’s a choice we make, one that defines whether we rise or sink.
Even if the struggle is absurd, even if the void is laughing, what else are you going to do? Lie down and die? Hell no. You get up, you fight, and you earn your freedom—not because it’s easy, but because it’s the only way to stay human.
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