Ordinary life tends to follow the same worn script: a comfortable monotony governed by constraints and punctuated by sorrow. But every so often, lightning strikes. A burning shock that grabs you by the collar and whispers that there is more to this existence than its slow, languid suffocation.

In The Gay Science, Nietzsche writes that happiness lives inside the struggle. Reading him, it's hard not to feel summoned toward something greater. A spark catches somewhere deep in the gut: the call to excellence. "Ultimate nobility lies in the exception." A mantra that has driven whole generations to throw themselves entirely into becoming an athlete, a philosopher, an astrophysicist, a pianist… into offering to the world everything the body and mind can produce. But sometimes routine wins. Sometimes the light that once guided you dissolves into the fog of doubt and exhaustion. Modern life makes passivity seductive. Drifting through the years on a diet of guilty pleasures, asking nothing more of yourself is surprisingly easy. Most of us learn this firsthand somewhere around our university years, sitting in grey lecture halls, very far from these German philosophers. Recently, two small miracles happened.

On a Friday evening, I went to see Marty Supreme. The most Nietzschean film I have ever watched, for two reasons. The first is Marty Mauser himself: arrogant, amoral, consumed by a dream as pure as a diamond. I have never seen outsized ambition, wild and irrational optimism, embodied so fully on screen. Every frame sweats with panache, with a loose-limbed confidence, with the absolute urgency of becoming who you are, whatever it costs, whoever stands in the way. The urgency of releasing the thing trapped inside you, the thing that wants to scream to the world that the extraordinary is possible. Many found the character repellent, I found him sincere. Josh Safdie's film is an invitation to devour life in all its contradictions, much like Nietzsche's amor fati. To embrace grace and suffering in the same open arms. To hold a humiliating tournament defeat and the birth of your own child with the same trembling hands. This is where art proves its power: two and a half hours of raw, nerve-shredding cinema can make you feel years of vitalist philosophy in your bones.

A few days later, I turned on the television for the Olympic figure skating. And, like many people, it was there that I first encountered Alysa Liu. Her graceful, fierce, effortless, irreverent skating was occasionally punctuated, memorably, by a "That's what I'm fucking talking about!" She has said it more than once: what pushed her to such heights was her love of the fight, the fact that she has never felt more alive than when staring adversity in the eye. A living expression of what Nietzsche meant about vital force, that the will to power can only fully reveal itself through resistance. We don't really know her. We don't know what she thinks, how she votes, where she comes from. That's not what matters. People whose vitality overflows like hers are rare, especially in an age when everything is being smoothed down and sterilized. Like Marty Mauser, she is a figure whose irrational enthusiasm, worn with such casual persistence, makes you feel more alive than you have in years.

Watching these two people reignites something that everything else seems conspiring to extinguish. That force which drives you to paint on a larger canvas, to fight back against the grey dailiness that would have your shoulders finally give way under the weight of pessimism.

“Whatever your hand finds to do, do it with all your might; for there is no activity or planning or knowledge or wisdom in Sheol where you are going.”

Ecclesiastes 9:10