The Bottle and the Hammer
This morning, I wrote by hand. No keyboard. No AI. Just me, a pen, and the raw silence of the page. It felt slow, painfully so. My hand cramped after twenty minutes. More than once, I was tempted to stop and let ChatGPT “make it better.”
But I didn’t.
I’ve gotten used to speed. To asking, searching, clicking, and receiving. Recently, I’ve leaned too heavily on AI. Yes, it’s helped me craft sharp, clean articles—some better than what I might have written myself.
But I’ve lost something in the process. The pause. The struggle. The grit of getting stuck mid-sentence and wrestling my way forward.
Don’t get me wrong—tools help. But something’s missing when it’s too easy.
For me, the outcome is immaterial. What matters is the process. And something in me knows—has always known—that the only true joy is found in doing things the hard way. No shortcuts. No dopamine-fed rushes.
Just the long road, the quiet road. A meaningful life, a fulfilled life, is earned through resistance.
“He who has a why to live can bear almost any how.” — Nietzsche
I keep reminding myself that I write not to perform, but to understand. To strip myself bare. And my “how” must surely be a return to writing without crutches or quick fixes—and, most importantly, to suffer a bit through it all.
Bukowski: The Walk Through the Fire
“What matters most is how well you walk through the fire.” — Bukowski
Bukowski knew the fire well. He bathed in alcohol, sex, and chaos—not to feel alive, but to numb the gnawing emptiness. Yet when he wrote, it wasn’t performative. It was blood. He faced his demons not in his habits, but in his poetry.
He failed in life, and yet helped (and still helps me every day) to make sense of the world around us.
In Post Office, Bukowski wrote:
“I had to get out of bed, I had to get dressed, I had to eat. It was always the same thing. The same thing all over again. Then I had to go to work. And there were people. It was the worst of all. The people. It wasn’t that I hated them. I just didn’t like them. I didn’t want to be around them. I wanted to be alone. I wanted to get away from everything. But I couldn’t.”
Here, he’s describing more than hangovers and dead-end jobs. He’s naming the spiritual exhaustion of modern life. The quiet hell of repetition. The need for something other, but not knowing what, or how to wait for it. Perhaps, explaining why we sometimes need a drink, a cigar, or a 30-minute doom scroll on Instagram.
Where Bukowski numbs the ache, Nietzsche amplifies it—wants you to burn in it until you become something else.
Nietzsche: The Fire Without the Fix
Nietzsche had his own agony, but he rejected short fixes outright. He saw them as soul-eroding distractions. For him, the only worthy life was one of heroic suffering, chosen struggle, and radical self-overcoming.
In The Gay Science, he writes:
“For believe me: the secret for harvesting from existence the greatest fruitfulness and the greatest enjoyment is—to live dangerously! Build your cities on the slopes of Vesuvius! Send your ships into uncharted seas! Live at war with your peers and yourselves! Be robbers and conquerors as long as you cannot be rulers and possessors, you seekers of knowledge!”
Nietzsche doesn’t drink to forget. He climbs mountains to remember. And in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, he urges:
“You say the good cause justifies even war? I say to you: the good war sanctifies every cause. War and courage have done more great things than love of the neighbor. Not your pity but your bravery has saved the unfortunate.”
There’s no room for pity or comfort here. Nietzsche wants you to forge meaning, not flee into pleasures. He despised mediocrity—the kind that makes peace with boredom through cheap thrills.
The Tension: Numb or Transcend
Bukowski represents the part of us that’s tired of pretending—tired of lofty goals, tired of spiritual pep talks. He takes the hit, lights a smoke, and scribbles his lines anyway.
Nietzsche demands we become gods—not through pleasure, but through fire.
The one sits at a bar, the other climbs a peak. But both are alone. Both are burning. Both are trying to live without illusions.
So, which are you today?
The one who reaches for the bottle—or the one who grips the hammer?
I’d want to write by hand. Slowly. Imperfectly. To suffer in my writing.
But I’d also like a Davidoff Nicaragua Toro cigar and a Macallan 12-year-old Double Cask whiskey every now and then to go with my suffering.