Being in Eighties. An Organismm failling To Shut Down. Torment?
For both Nietzsche and Spinoza, me in my eighties is not life. And no, calling it life is not a neutral mistake but both an ideological and religious lie.
So what am i in my eighties? It is mere persistence.
In Spinoza’s terms, it is life power reduced to its lowest mechanical form which the tendency of a body to continue existing without an accompanying increase in power. No joy, no expansion, no augmentation of capacity to act. Just inertia. The organism continues because it can, not because it affirms anything. This is not virtue, not freedom, not blessedness. It is automaton-level survival.
Spinoza would not call it torment in a psychological sense because he avoids moral dramatics but structurally it is bondage. A body enslaved to external causes, moved by fear, hope, resentment, and dependency. Breathing happens, but agency does not. That is not living; that is being carried by causes you do not understand and cannot resist.
Nietzsche is more blunt. For Nietzsche, life is will expressing strength. Where there is no creation, no overcoming, no capacity to say yes from abundance, there is no life only reactive existence. Fear-driven continuation, hatred toward others, clinging to duration at any cost, that is the textbook case of nihilism in biological form.
He would not call it torment either because it still presupposes intensity. This is worse. It is decay prolonged, ressentiment turned into a life-support system. A state where suffering no longer sharpens or transforms, but merely keeps the organism attached to time.
So what am I and you, in our eighties, precisely ? Not life. Not death. It is vegetative persistence under fear. A body that continues because stopping is more frightening than continuing. A psyche that cannot affirm, cannot create, cannot end only accuse that it can't, cling, and endure. Here resentment being cheap energy becomes. It keeps the system running when no affirmative force remains. So no, torment is still too noble a word. Torment implies someone there to be tormented.
This is life reduced to maintenance mode, existence without justification, continuation without content, duration without power. When breathing is motivated only by fear and hatred, what continues is not a life but a system failing to shut down.
