It’s Groundhog Day, again! The popular film explored an idea that religion and philosophy had previously grappled with: What if time isn’t linear, but cyclical? What if we are condemned to relive our lives again and again, to eternity? Groundhog Day presents this possibility as a challenge but also an opportunity: to imagine what the best versions of ourselves could be, even if the world around us remained the same. Nietzsche, on the other hand, imagined an eternal recurrence in which nothing changed, every little detail of our lives was relived in exactly the same way, for eternity. He recognized the idea was terrifying, but he also saw it as an exercise in affirming our existence, even the most horrible aspects of it, writes Matt Bennett.
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