Friedrich Nietzsche and Kurt Vonnegut walk into a bar.
And instead of arguing they become instant besties.
You’d think that a glib humanist and a crispy nihilist would be oil and water, but nope. They echo each other’s sentiments and reinforce each other’s intensely exasperated curiosity about humanity in general—and below are just a few examples of that. I mean, somebody could do a whole dissertation on this (sorry, not me).
I translated ten overlapping sentiments into sentences that captured a few ripples of those echoes, and the exercise made me want to watch a show with these two characters getting drunk and discussing modern headlines.
Cheers to the friendly banter of humanism and nihilism.