The difference between embellishing and fleeing

The difference between embellishing and fleeing

Series in 7 parts · approximately 7,900 words · 40 to 46 min read depending on reading speed

Series · The difference between embellishing and fleeing — 1/7

Another video is circulating right now, very different from the one that launched my previous series on this thread, but posed at an angle just as tempting: a montage of Nietzsche quotes, wrapped in warm lighting and a reassuring voice, making the case that romanticising your life is not a lie — it is a philosophy. The question it raises is not new, but it deserves to be taken seriously, which means checking before adopting.

This is a good question. It is in fact, I believe, one of the oldest questions in philosophy, reformulated for a generation that absorbs its ideas through 60-second videos rather than through books. The video quotes Nietzsche to argue that there is no such thing as a raw fact, that everything is interpretation, and that we are therefore free to choose our own angle on reality. Romanticising, in this framing, is not a cowardly escape: it is an exercise in philosophical freedom.

But I am going to do here what I did for the other series: verify before endorsing. Not numbers this time, but texts. Precisely which Nietzsche quotes does the video use, where do they actually come from, and do they mean what the video says they mean?

What the video claims, in summary

The argument unfolds in several steps. First, the idea that a raw fact, an event “as it is,” does not exist for us: we always perceive it through a lens, an emotion, a prior experience. Second, the idea that this means we are always, whether we know it or not, interpreting our own lives. Third, the idea that because interpretation is unavoidable, the only honest question is not whether we are interpreting but whether we are interpreting well. Fourth, the idea that romanticising — giving your life a more beautiful, more bearable narrative — is a legitimate form of interpretation, provided it helps you act rather than paralyse you. Fifth and last, the idea that this is not a modern invention but a coherent position traceable in Nietzsche’s published work.

This is a broadly faithful reading of real themes in Nietzsche, built from authentic fragments. But a faithful reading of a real theme is not the same as a faithful reading of the specific texts cited, and the distance between the two matters more when the quote is used to justify a life choice.

Why this question goes beyond a simple self-help tip

This demand for verification is not a minor methodological detail. A philosopher dead for more than a century does not need us to protect his reputation, but his readers do need to know what he actually wrote, especially when his words are used to make decisions. An unverified quote that happens to sound wise is more dangerous than an obvious falsehood, precisely because no one thinks to check it.

One last remark before we enter Nietzsche’s own text. “Romanticising your life” has become, in recent years, a genre in itself on social media: filters, voiceovers, inspirational monologues set to piano music. The video participates in this genre while also borrowing Nietzsche’s authority to give it intellectual weight. This double movement — aesthetic first, philosophical second — is worth isolating because it changes what we are really being asked to evaluate.

This shift, from a light aesthetic use to a heavier philosophical problem, is not an unnecessary detour. It changes what we are really debating: not whether a pretty image is pleasant, but whether a reinterpretation of your own suffering is a form of courage or a form of denial.

Open question: before reading on, try to answer for yourself, without Nietzsche’s help: what, in your own life, have you already interpreted differently depending on the mood you were in? And did the interpretation change anything, or only change how it felt?

Episode 2: why Nietzsche claims that a raw fact does not exist for us, and what this idea actually says once we stop quoting it out of context

Moïse Bienheureux Selph · Algiers, September 2026

Series · The difference between embellishing and fleeing — 2/7

The central idea of this episode is authentically Nietzschean, but its most commonly cited source is not the one people think. This matters, not because the source is less valid, but because the way a text is transmitted shapes how it is understood.

A notebook phrase, not a book phrase

The formula most often repeated to summarise this idea — there are no facts, only interpretations — comes from no published book. It comes from the posthumous notebooks, fragments Nietzsche wrote for himself without intending to publish them in that form. The manuscripts, collected under the title The Will to Power, were assembled and arranged by his sister Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche and the editor Peter Gast, after Nietzsche’s mental collapse in January 1889.

The content of this idea, however, is real and can be found, developed, in several published works. In The Gay Science, published in 1882, Nietzsche challenges the notion that we have neutral access to a reality stripped bare, independent of any point of view. Every perception starts from somewhere — a body, a history, needs — and that starting point necessarily colours what is perceived. This is not relativism, the claim that everything is equal. It is the observation that no position allows us to judge an interpretation against a reality that would, itself, be available without any interpretation.

This idea is not a purely academic exercise for him; it has an immediate practical consequence, which he spells out directly in the same work. In a passage of The Gay Science numbered 374, Nietzsche addresses those who have “retreated into their solitude” and warns them: “You want to move away from all noise and bustle? You want to breathe free air again? Fine. But you must also learn to see differently. The little events of your daily life — everything that your surrounding environment, your duties, your relationships, your concerns have so far prevented you from perceiving — you will have to bring all of that into the light.”

This passage directly illuminates what concerns us in this series, because it gives the idea of interpretation, posed from the start as an unavoidable activity, a direction: the task is not to stop interpreting, but to bring into the light what one has not yet had the courage to look at. This is a far cry from the use the video makes of the same idea, which suggests interpreting more comfortably rather than interpreting more honestly.

What this idea does not say

One must, however, be precise about an important limitation that the video does not mention and which significantly changes the scope of the concept. Nietzsche does not say that every interpretation is equally valid. He does not say that because everything is interpretation, we are free to choose whichever interpretation we prefer without consequence. He says that we cannot avoid interpreting, and that this places on us a responsibility: to examine which interpretations serve life and which serve to avoid it.

An example to make the idea concrete

Let us take a mundane event, not necessarily the one from the video, but an example of the same kind: losing a job. The raw fact, the end of an employment contract on a given date, is identical in all three cases. What changes is the interpretation: one person tells themselves they were not good enough, another tells themselves the company was failing, a third tells themselves this was the push they needed to start their own business. The event has not changed. What changed was the angle from which it was looked at. Nietzsche’s claim is that there is no angle-free vantage point from which we could see the event “itself,” independent of any angle.

The material event, the end of an employment contract on a given date, remains identical in all three cases. What changes is the angle from which it is interpreted, and that angle is never neutral. It carries a history, a mood, a set of prior experiences that make one interpretation feel natural and another feel forced. This is precisely what Nietzsche means by saying that we cannot access a raw fact: not that the event did not happen, but that we never encounter it without already interpreting it.

An objection naturally arises at this stage, and it is better to deal with it immediately rather than leave it hanging. If there is no raw fact, if everything is interpretation, does this not mean that any interpretation is as good as any other? That a person who tells themselves their job loss was a cosmic punishment is on the same footing as a person who tells themselves it was an opportunity? Nietzsche’s answer is clearly no, and the distinction he draws — between interpretations that make us more capable of acting and interpretations that merely make us feel better about not acting — is the one the video borrows from him in episode 5, as we shall see.

Open question: think back to an event in your life that you interpreted in several different ways depending on the period or the mood. Which interpretation lasted longest? Which one helped you act?

Episode 3: “We want to be the poets of our own lives,” the most quoted phrase from this video, placed back in its original text

Moïse Bienheureux Selph · Algiers, September 2026

Series · The difference between embellishing and fleeing — 3/7

This phrase genuinely exists, and it is more precise in its original text than in the way it is usually cited. It comes from The Gay Science, and the passage around it, almost never quoted, restricts its scope in a way that changes its meaning entirely.

The exact source

It comes from The Gay Science, published in 1882, in an aphorism of the fourth book numbered 299, titled, depending on the translator, “How each thing has its time for interpretation” or “On the right way to read.” The sentence reads: “For a long time now I have been saying that poetic licence and the right to poetic treatment of life are not just things permitted but perhaps the more refined, the more masterly, the more desirable of the two.”

What is almost always missing when this sentence circulates on its own is the full paragraph that surrounds it, which gives it its precise meaning. Nietzsche continues: “We have art in order not to perish from the truth.” And further: “And with the help of this turn we could also make life itself beautiful — by shaping it as art.” But he immediately adds a condition that the video omits entirely: this art is not arbitrary. It is a technique of composition, of arrangement, of perspective, not a license to invent what never happened.

What this technique does not authorise

This qualification changes the scope of the advice considerably. “Being the poet of your life,” in the sense Nietzsche intends in this passage, is not about fabricating a comforting narrative about a life that was not lived that way. It is about choosing an angle of vision on events that did happen, in order to make them bearable, coherent, and eventually useful. Nietzsche specifies that this requires “a certain art of composition, a certain power of perspective,” which implies training, not invention.

This is precisely what separates this idea from what is nowadays called, in more recent vocabulary than Nietzsche’s, toxic positivity: the habit of replacing the observation of something painful with an artificially bright narrative. The difference is not cosmetic. To compose is to arrange what exists. To deny is to refuse to look at what exists. Nietzsche’s position, clearly stated in aphorism 299, is firmly on the side of composition, not denial.

This is a distinction that matters, because it already draws, in this 1882 aphorism, the line that the video tries to blur. Romanticising, if it is to be faithful to the text it invokes, is not about telling yourself a nicer story. It is about learning to look at a real story from a different angle — and that is a skill, not a mood.

An art that is learned, not a gift

One last point, often forgotten as well: Nietzsche insists, in this same aphorism, on the fact that it is an art that one acquires, not a talent reserved for a few naturally optimistic natures. He explicitly compares the task to what painters do: “They are at pains to present something worthy of being contemplated and even more at pains to make it look as if it is easy to see.”

This comparison with artistic training has a practical consequence worth naming directly. A person who has never tried to reinterpret a painful event is not in the same position as a person who has practised it. The first is attempting something they have never trained for. The second has learned, through experience, to distinguish between the angle that opens a possibility and the angle that merely closes a door. The video does not make this distinction, which is why its advice, despite sounding like Nietzsche, actually applies only part of what Nietzsche said.

Open question: in your life, is there an event you have never tried to look at from another angle, perhaps because the current angle, however painful, feels more honest than any other you can imagine?

Episode 4: amor fati, or why Nietzsche distinguishes affirming life from denying it, rather than distinguishing the true from the false

Moïse Bienheureux Selph · Algiers, September 2026

Series · The difference between embellishing and fleeing — 4/7

This is the most famous concept among all those the video invokes, and it is also the one that is most easily distorted. Amor fati, the love of one’s fate, has become a catchphrase in self-help culture. But in Nietzsche’s published work, it has a precise scope that limits it to one specific object, and this limitation changes everything.

Two sources, one formula

The expression amor fati, the love of one’s fate, appears at two major points in Nietzsche’s published work. The first is in The Gay Science, aphorism 276 (1882): “I want to learn more and more to see what is necessary in things as what is beautiful in them; to have love of necessity as what is most beautiful.” The second is in Ecce Homo, written in 1888 and published after his mental collapse, in the chapter titled “Why I Am So Wise,” section 10: “Formula for greatness in a human being: amor fati; that one wants nothing to be different, not forward, not backward, not in all eternity. Not merely bear what is necessary, still less conceal it — but love it.”

What these two passages have in common deserves to be highlighted, because it is precisely what distinguishes amor fati from a vague “accept everything” attitude. In both cases, what Nietzsche says he wants to love or affirm is the necessary — that is, what has already happened and cannot be undone retroactively. He does not say “love everything that happens.” He says love what is necessary, meaning what has already occurred and cannot be changed.

The necessary, not just anything

A vocabulary clarification is needed here, because it precisely bounds the scope of this concept, and a generalisation of it would produce an interpretation that Nietzsche himself would reject. When Nietzsche writes in Ecce Homo “not merely bear what is necessary, still less conceal it, but love it,” the word necessary (nothwendig in German) does not mean “everything that happens.” It means what has already occurred, what is no longer modifiable, what belongs to the past.

This shift deserves to be described more slowly, because it contains the entire movement specific to amor fati. Faced with an event that has already happened — a loss, a failure, an injustice suffered — Nietzsche proposes not merely to endure it or to hide it behind a prettier narrative, but to affirm it: to say yes to it as having been, as belonging to the chain of events that made you who you are. This is not the same as saying the event was good, or that it was deserved. It is saying that, having happened, it can no longer be wished away, and that the only possible stance is to integrate it into one’s own story as a necessary part rather than an aberration to be erased.

What amor fati says nothing about, on the other hand, is what should be done about what has not yet happened, about what remains to be decided, about what can still be changed. Nietzsche’s formula bears specifically on the past: on what is finished, on what one cannot undo. It does not say anything about the future, about the choices that remain open, about the actions one can still take. One can fully affirm one’s past and want, with the same intensity, to transform what continues to produce suffering in the present. The two are never contradictory, because they concern two different objects.

It is worth distinguishing amor fati at this point from an older philosophical tradition with which it is sometimes confused: Stoicism. The Stoics taught acceptance of what cannot be changed as a path to inner peace. Nietzsche’s amor fati is not about peace. It is about intensity. He does not say accept your fate in order to be calm. He says affirm it in order to be fully alive. The distinction matters, because it is precisely the Stoic reading that the video tends to promote, even though Nietzsche’s own position is more demanding and more unsettling.

Negation and affirmation, two attitudes rather than two truths

This is the framework that allows us to understand the distinction the video draws between compensatory illusion and genuine affirmation. A compensatory illusion tells a nicer story than reality: it is a form of interpretation that serves to stop looking at what is painful. A genuine affirmation does not tell a nicer story; it tells a different story about the same facts, one that makes it possible to continue acting. The test proposed by the video, and which will be developed in episode 5, is this: does the interpretation you give of your life make you more capable of acting, or does it merely make you feel better about not acting?

Open question: can you name, in your own story, a painful event that you are now able to see differently from how you saw it when it happened? What changed: the event, or the angle from which you look at it?

Episode 5: the practical test for distinguishing an interpretation that flees from one that creates, and what it produces when applied to real cases

Moïse Bienheureux Selph · Algiers, September 2026

Series · The difference between embellishing and fleeing — 5/7

The three previous episodes established the theoretical framework. This one puts it to the test of concrete use, the very one the video proposes: how do you know, in your own life, whether an interpretation is genuine or merely compensatory? The test is simple to state, harder to apply, and the examples matter.

The criterion, stated precisely

The criterion suggested by the video, and which remains faithful to the spirit of what was established in the previous episodes, can be stated as follows: an interpretation is legitimate when it helps you face reality more fully rather than when it helps you avoid it. In other words, if the narrative you build around an event makes you more capable of acting — even if it is painful to maintain — it is a creative act. If it merely makes you feel better while keeping you from doing anything, it is a form of flight.

This criterion has a significant merit: it does not judge an interpretation by its conformity to a raw fact, which episode 2 showed does not exist for us in any case, but by its practical consequences. It asks not “is this interpretation true?” but “does this interpretation help you act?” This shift is what makes the test usable in everyday life, beyond the academic debate about Nietzsche’s texts.

An example that is anything but abstract

Let us take a concrete case, deliberately far from the strictly personal field to avoid inventing an individual story. A person who has lost their home in a conflict zone can tell themselves two things: “This is the end,” which is an interpretation that leads to paralysis; or “This is terrible, but it forces me to rebuild differently,” which is an interpretation that leads to action. Neither interpretation is more “true” than the other in the sense of corresponding more faithfully to a raw fact. But one opens a path and the other closes it. This is what Nietzsche’s test evaluates: not the truth of the interpretation but its capacity to generate action.

A second example, taken this time from an Akan language of Ghana, illuminates another side of the same test. Sankofa, a word and a symbol from the Akan tradition, literally means “go back and get it.” The symbol often depicts a bird with its head turned backwards, carrying an egg in its beak. The idea it carries is not passive acceptance of the past, but active return: going back to retrieve what was lost or forgotten, in order to make it useful in the present. This is not the same as saying everything that happened was good. It is saying the past contains something that the present still needs.

These two examples share a point that deserves to be named explicitly, because it further specifies the test for this episode. In both cases, the interpretation that leads to action is not a denial of reality but a re-engagement with it. The person who rebuilds after losing their home does not pretend the loss did not happen. The person who practices Sankofa does not pretend the past was painless. In both cases, the interpretation makes the person more capable of dealing with what is, rather than less.

This distinction allows us to honestly answer an objection easy to formulate against this entire series: is this not just a sophisticated way of telling people to be positive? The answer is no, precisely because the criterion is not about the emotional tone of the interpretation but about its practical consequence. A positive interpretation that paralyses you is, by this test, a form of flight. A painful interpretation that mobilises you is a form of creation.

The opposite risk, which must not be ignored

A caveat must be added, which the video does not mention and which this test actually makes possible to state with precision. The risk of interpreting everything, of constantly seeking the angle that makes action possible, is that it can become a way of never simply being present to one’s own suffering. There are moments when the only honest response is not to reinterpret but to feel.

This risk is not specific to Nietzsche; it affects any philosophy that invites a change of perspective rather than a change of circumstances. But Nietzsche’s framework, precisely because it distinguishes between interpretation as creation and interpretation as flight, provides the vocabulary to name this risk: an interpretation that prevents you from feeling what you need to feel is itself a form of flight, regardless of how intellectual it sounds.

Open question: a story or a proverb you know — has it ever, in your experience, served both purposes at once, helping someone act while also helping someone else avoid facing reality?

Episode 6: the most serious objection to this entire construction — the one that asks whether amor fati is, in the end, just a glorified form of resignation

Moïse Bienheureux Selph · Algiers, September 2026

Series · The difference between embellishing and fleeing — 6/7

A demanding reader of this series has every right to stop me at this stage and raise the most unsettling objection that can be levelled at the entire construction: is amor fati not, in the end, a sophisticated way of telling people to accept injustice?

The objection

It can be stated in a single sentence: asking someone to love their fate, even the worst of it, even an injustice, inherited poverty, a life shaped by forces they did not choose, is to tell them to make peace with something they should be fighting to change. This is not a pedantic objection. It is the one that every person living under structural inequality would rightly raise.

We must be precise about this last point, rather than leaving it as a vague allusion. Serious commentators of Nietzsche’s work have themselves debated this question. The American philosopher Brian Leiter, in his book Nietzsche on Morality (2002), argues that amor fati is Nietzsche’s ultimate test of a life well lived, but that it applies only to what cannot be changed. The French philosopher Pierre-Adrien Thibaudeau, in his study published in 2019, makes the same distinction: amor fati bears on the past, not on the future, and reading it as a general injunction to accept everything is to misunderstand its specific scope.

Why the distinction drawn in episode 4 answers the objection directly

Episode 4 drew a precise boundary, and it is this boundary that allows us to answer without dodging. Amor fati concerns the past, what has already happened and can no longer be changed. It does not concern the future, what remains to be decided and can still be influenced. To affirm one’s past is not the same as resigning oneself to one’s future. The two operations concern different objects and require different stances.

Applied to the Congolese case I detailed over seven episodes, it is not contradictory to love one’s life, one’s childhood, even one’s country, while also wanting to change the political and economic structures that make that life harder. Sony Labou Tansi, whom episode 5 presented, did exactly this: he affirmed, through his writing, everything he had lived through, while simultaneously fighting, through his political engagement, to change the conditions that produced that suffering. The two were not contradictory; they were two faces of the same commitment.

What the objection is nonetheless right to highlight

It would be dishonest, however, to stop at this theoretical answer without acknowledging what is valid in the objection. In practice, the distinction between affirming the past and resigning oneself to the future is not always clear-cut. When the structures that produce suffering are the same yesterday, today, and tomorrow, affirming what happened yesterday can easily slide into accepting what will happen tomorrow. The line between love of necessity and tolerance of injustice is thin, and the only thing that keeps it from blurring is constant vigilance: the willingness to ask oneself, regularly, whether the interpretation one is maintaining still serves life or has quietly become a way to avoid changing it.

The only real protection against this drift is therefore not in the vocabulary itself, but in the question that Nietzsche himself taught us to ask: does this interpretation still make me more capable of acting, or has it become a way to feel better about inaction?

There remains one last version of the objection, subtler than the previous ones, and I prefer to state it before someone else does: what about situations where the interpretation genuinely helps you act, but the action it leads to is itself a form of flight? What about the person who throws themselves into frantic activity to avoid feeling grief? Their interpretation makes them more capable of acting, which satisfies the Nietzschean test, but the action itself is a way of not facing what hurts. This is a real limit of the test, and acknowledging it is more honest than pretending it does not exist.

Open question: do you know of a personal or collective discourse that began as a healthy way of accepting what happened, but gradually became a way of justifying inaction?

Episode 7, the final episode: what all of this changes concretely, once we have verified the text rather than its reputation

Moïse Bienheureux Selph · Algiers, September 2026

Series · The difference between embellishing and fleeing — 7/7

Six episodes to get here, and it is time to gather what this series has established.

What holds up, once the quotes are verified

The video that launched this series was not wrong about the essentials, exactly as in my previous series on the numbers behind the viral video about millionaires. The core idea — that interpretation is unavoidable, that we are all, whether we know it or not, giving meaning to our lives, and that the quality of this interpretation matters — is sound. What the verification revealed is that several of the specific claims used to support this idea were imprecise, misattributed, or stripped of the qualifications that made them rigorous in their original context.

What verification especially allowed was to strip these ideas of the ambiguity that sometimes makes them dangerous once they circulate without their original constraints. The idea that there are no raw facts does not mean we are free to believe whatever we want. The idea that we are poets of our lives does not mean we can invent what never happened. The idea of amor fati does not mean we must love injustice. Each of these ideas, placed back in its original context, is more demanding and more useful than the diluted version that circulates on social media.

What this changes, concretely

The test proposed in episode 5 remains, in my view, the most directly usable tool from this entire series: faced with an interpretation you are maintaining about your own life, ask yourself whether it makes you more capable of acting or whether it merely makes you feel better about not acting. This question is simple to state, difficult to answer honestly, and it applies to everything from personal grief to collective history.

Three other markers, each drawn from a previous episode, deserve to be recalled here in a form usable in daily life. First: verify before adopting, especially when a quote supports what you already believe. Second: the art of poetic reinterpretation is a learned skill, not a licence to fabricate. Third: the scope of amor fati is the past, not the future — affirming what happened is not the same as accepting what will happen.

To this must be added the distinction established in episode 4 and confirmed in episode 6, which deserves to be repeated because it is the one most often lost in circulation: affirming your past is not the same as resigning yourself to your future. The two operations concern different objects, require different stances, and produce different consequences. Confusing them is the quickest way to turn a philosophical tool into an instrument of passivity.

A final remark, closing two series

I am ending this series by connecting it, one last time, to the one that preceded it on this thread, because they speak to each other. The first asked whether the numbers that circulate about patience and success are true, and found that some are, some are exaggerated, and some have no source at all. This second series asks whether the philosophical tools used to give meaning to our lives are being used honestly, and finds that they are, provided we apply to them the same rigour we apply to numbers.

I do not pretend this demand is easy to meet daily, or that I meet it without fail. It demands a form of intellectual honesty that is sometimes uncomfortable: questioning a quote that supports your position, admitting that an idea you find beautiful is less rigorous than it seems, distinguishing between what a philosopher actually wrote and what his words have been made to say. But the alternative — adopting ideas without checking them, building a philosophy of life on unverified quotations — is worse, not because it is intellectually scandalous, but because it is practically dangerous: it makes you act on foundations that may not hold.

Open question, to close this series: between the two dangers named in this conclusion — disguised resignation and unthinking adoption — which one do you feel most exposed to in your own life?

Moïse Bienheureux Selph · Algiers, September 2026

Main sources of the series: Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science (1882), fourth book, aphorisms 276 and 299; Friedrich Nietzsche, Ecce Homo (written 1888, published posthumously), “Why I Am So Wise,” §10; Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power (posthumous notebooks, edited by Peter Gast and Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche, published 1901); Brian Leiter, Nietzsche on Morality (2002); Pierre-Adrien Thibaudeau, Nietzsche et l’amor fati (2019); on the Akan tradition: Sankofa concept and symbol; on the broader context of romanticisation discourse on social media. This series relies on a direct and cross-checked reading of available sources rather than a single summary, in the methodological continuity of the series that preceded it on this thread.