Ressentiment: why Nietzsche matters even if you never read him
Are you trading the power to change for the pleasure of feeling sinned‑against?
A long time ago I found myself crouched behind a bush, sucking lukewarm beer through a hole in a can that I had just dropped on the sidewalk. I couldn’t afford to lose that beer, you see, since I saw it as my medicine. I had just finished selling plasma to be able to afford that beer, and they wouldn’t let me back in to ‘donate’ for another day or two, so this case was all I had. Of course I dropped it, and of course a can exploded open, and of course I grabbed that can and drank it as fast as I could where, I hoped, nobody could see me but me.
According to me back then, alcohol was medically and morally necessary for me. I saw myself as having a preciously-special brain that needed alcohol to survive. I saw myself as a victim of an unjust world, cruelly expected to live in spite of the systemic injustice that my high-octane brain made me so acutely aware of. Drinking was my vitamin, and drinking was my revenge. People who suggested that I stop should check their ableist neurotypical privilege. My suffering, and my awareness of the world’s suffering, entitled me to any and all forms of compensation, and the world needed to catch the fuck up.
Put bluntly, I drank because I declared that I deserved to drink. Getting sober wasn’t just a matter of deleting alcohol from my life, it was a matter of deconstructing the patterns of thought that led me to declare myself entitled to drink that way in the first place. Getting sober asked me to take another look at that suffering-entitlement cycle, to see how I was hoarding my suffering as a weird kind of currency, to see how the entire process was both wasteful and optional.
My story of addiction is, relatively speaking, extreme. The logic behind it, however, is surprisingly ordinary. Any time we tell ourselves “I suffer therefore I deserve,” we enlist pain as a debt‑collector, an instrument that is supposed to somehow force the world to pay us back.
Nietzsche, the philosopher, has given me a great deal of conceptual insight into what was going on with me - his genius is that he spots this little psychological sleight of hand not just in desperate drinkers like me but in the most respectable corners of modern morality.
Nietzsche coined the term ‘ressentiment’ for a distinctive moral stance that he saw hardening in people. As he saw it, all living things seek to grow and thrive and enact their will in the world, but the world inevitably pushes back and our willpower comes up short somewhere. At our limits, we have a choice: either learn to love the sheer act of striving itself, or turn our frustrated striving inwards and flip it upside down. Ressentiment is where that inwardly-turned will constructs an entire moral universe around its own impotence, recasting its weakness as righteousness. The result is a person who feels chronically wronged yet secretly superior, whose grievances function both as a plea for pity and as a weapon of moral condemnation.
Nietzsche is often caricatured as the chest-thumping champion of ruthless strength and indifference to injustice. As I read him, his critique of ressentiment is an invitation to reclaim authentic strength - the capacity to act, to create, to affirm life directly and to forge a better world without letting our energies get trapped in fraudulent pity-parties. Pain loses its power when we stop trying to turn it into ammunition. Pain dominates us when we refuse to partake in creativity or service or genuine human connection until someone else consoles us and tells us that yes, you were right all along, you poor little thing.
If that dynamic sounds familiar to anyone who has lived through active addiction, it should! My beer-in-the-bush moment had all the hallmarks of ressentiment. It had impotence, my own (barely acknowledged) inability to face the human condition without drinking. It had inversion, where instead of calling that helplessness what it was I re-cast it as a sign of my heroic sensitivity. It had moral reversal, where the correct and helpful people who suggested that I get my shit together were the villainous representatives of dull-eyed exploitative normie culture. Most importantly, it had entitlement, where my suffering meant that I was due for unlimited consolation with no strings attached.
The steps of AA, Steps 4-9 in particular, help pull ressentiment up by the root.
In step 4, the addict takes an inventory of everything and everyone they resent, looking for their part in what went wrong no matter how big or small. You may own only 5% of what went wrong, but you still own 100% of that 5%!
In step 5, the addict talks through this inventory with their sponsor, someone who can help them ‘right-size’ their reactions to the drama of their past. Some things aren’t worth getting upset about - somethings are worth getting upset about, but don’t make you the most interestingly-wronged person in the world. You are a normal human with normal human problems, even if some of them are big, and you are as responsible for your life everyone else has to be.
In steps 6 and 7, the addict looks for patterns of behavior that they are responsible for, patterns which are lurking behind the breakdowns they identified in steps 4 and 5. The addict becomes willing to let those patterns go, which is a surprising amount of work in itself - bad behaviors persist because we get something out of them, and we have to satisfy that ‘something’ another way or learn to let it go. I drank because it worked, after all!
In steps 8-9, the addict takes new, direct, responsible actions to make amends for their old behavior, actions which directly contravene the entitlement and avoidance that ressentiment tells us we get to have. It’s scary to do, and that’s exactly the point Nietzsche makes when he says ‘what doesn’t kill me makes me stronger’. That scariness is proof that we are smashing the false old idols that we worshiped, the idols that promised us a false utopia and only kept us sick.
Dropping the logic of ressentiment - catching yourself every time you’re tempted to say “my pain means that I deserve this” - creates the possibility of authentic, unencumbered, uncomplicated joy. It does not remove the possibility of pain itself, which is Nietzsche's deepest point: we can choose to see pain as just another dish in the great human feast of experience. This is a baffling, challenging invitation, which is what makes it worth contemplating! Pain is inevitable, but we remain responsible for what we make of it as raw material for our lives.
None of this is meant to shame pain or dismiss anger. Nietzsche’s point - and the Big Book’s, for that matter - is that pain is too precious a fuel to waste on self‑pity. Pain can be alchemized into all kinds of worthy things - solidarity, art, or policy change - or we can lock it up and let it rot in the box of “look what they did to me :(”
Here’s what I want to leave you with. If you find yourself hoarding suffering to justify the next drink (or a self-righteous, self‑destructive indulgence of any kind), pause and ask: Am I trading the power to change for the pleasure of feeling sinned‑against? As soon as you can even begin to answer “yes,” your awareness has broken you outside of ressentiment’s downward spiral. The work that follows - the inventory, the restitution, community restoration - is indeed hard, but it is at least real work, done in daylight, and never done alone.