15. EXTRA: Important Announcement

Join me for an important announcement about the future of the show. Your thoughts on this news most welcome using the "message the show" hotlink.

Transcript

Esteemed listeners. 

Important bit of news for your here. After due consideration, I’m changing the name of the podcast and the project.

Why am I doing this? Well, the podcast has been broadcasting for three months now, we have 14 episodes, and about 850 downloads. Not a bad start and I am pretty happy with the way things are going but, as I'm sure you appreciate, reaching its audience is the biggest challenge for any podcast and its a growing audience that makes a project like this sustainable over the longer term. 

The current name, becoming Ubermensch, is a bit of a mouthful to pronounce and is not intuitively easy to spell for English speakers. Additionally, there can be some confusion in web-searches around the german umlaut, which are those two dots over the U in Übermensch. 

But mainly, the word just carries too many misconceptions. Ubermensch has too many unwarranted but unhelpful connotations and though these can be easily dispelled, if people are too put off to even give the show a listen, that misunderstanding cannot even be addressed. 

What the Ubermensch really is, in a nutshell, is the the logical aspiration for a species that has lost absolute meaning due to the death of god. Which is to say, in a world where there is no given cosmic purpose for human existence, the conscious pursuit of the unending elevation of its own type is the obvious and last telos for our species. 

Now, of course, this podcast is not about our aspirations for the species, but about your aspirations as an individual. For that the Ubermensch constitutes a beacon and a direction and an inspiration - so the idea both of becoming and of the ubermensch are still very central to this work.

In order then, for this podcast to find its appropriate audience and invite them in, I think we need a broader, brighter name for the project. The new name I have chosen is, will to joy. 

This trips of the tongue easily and has a nice rhythm to it. Three syllables instead of six. It's also simple, searchable, and is charged with a much more positive valence. 

Will to Joy still makes the same promise as Becoming Übermensch, but in more unambiguous terms. Our project is not just about overcoming, but about overflowing. Not just striving, but intensifying. Not escaping suffering, but transfiguring life into something beautiful. For Nietzsche power and joy are the same thing, so will to joy encapsulates Nietzschean philosophy in a new attractive, more euphoric, more playful way.

The direction of this project remains unchanged, and there's going to be no watering down of the ideas because at the end of the day, this project is not for everybody, just cannot be for everybody - but for those who can reap rich rewards from Nietzsche's ideas, I want to make sure this stuff is actually reachable.

So: Will to Joy.

That’s where we’re headed. Joy!

Let me know what you think — if you’re listening, you’re already a part of this.

Also, if you want to support this work, please consider supporting the show - link always in the show's description. And don't forget you can become a De Profundis member on Patreon. In the next couple of weeks, I'm going to be loading up some exclusive content for the De Profundis membership. This is material for those who want to go much deeper, who are ready for something... more Dionysian, and who feel up to tackling some more challenging approaches to accelerating personal growth and transcendence - the link for De Profundis patreon membership also in every show's description.

Remember too, you can help the show simply by liking, sharing, subscribing, and reviewing, on whatever platform you access it. Again, that really helps keep the lights on here. And I do notice when people help promote the show.

Thank you all, I appreciate you.

More from me later this week, as per our schedule, when we’ll be making an attempt to identify and isolate that most elusive of phantasms, the soul. Do you have a soul? Can you define it? Can you catch it by the tail? Well, on Friday, we''l be hot on the trail of the soul and we will answer these questions together - in a way that you might find definitive. This one may rock your sense of self - be warned.

In the meantime, as ever, like the man said, live dangerously.