The Same Old Fears

“What if a demon crept after you one night... and said: ‘This life, as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more’...” — Nietzsche, The Gay Science.

What is it that changes—the song, or the listener?

At 18, when the world is still raw with possibility, and the self has not yet calcified under the slow drip of compromise, to listen to Wish You Were Here is to hear a howl against the herd. The young one, godless and hungry, who played that track in his dimly lit room was not merely enjoying music—he was affirming life in the only way he knew how: by negating everything handed to him. Religion, career, duty, obedience—this he believed to be the sickly comfort of a world too cowardly to gaze into the abyss. Rock music, for this youth, was not entertainment; it was rebellion, pure, uncut and faintly Dionysian. In Wish You Were Here, he heard a lament for the ones who had dared to feel, to burn, and had vanished into the machinery of compromise. It was a hymn for the mad ones, not middle managers. Its questions—“Did you exchange a walk-on part in the war for a lead role in a cage?”—felt like scripture for the anti-establishment soul.

But fast forward 12 years later. It is Monday evening. The fluorescent lights have gone out, the team meetings have ended, the spreadsheets sleep until tomorrow. The same song plays again, but in the background now. It wafts through the car stereo as he sits in the midst of snail-pace traffic, tie loosened watching a Slack window fill with requests. The sound is the same, but the meaning is different. The idealist has been transmuted into the worker. And the song—oh, the song!—has become a ghostly echo. Is he listening now in irony, in nostalgia, or in mourning?

The young one would say, “You are listening through the ears of your own betrayal.” His nihilism was active: it wanted to transvalue all values, to burn the inherited in order to forge the chosen.

The fall from idealism is always a staircase, never a cliff. He wore the tie like a costume at first, convinced it wouldn’t stick. He called it “just a phase,” the way others once described his obsession with Pink Floyd and abstract freedom. But the tie tightened. The desk became familiar. The screen became a second skin. The Monday evening came, and with it the traffic, the tired spine, the quiet panic disguised as routine.

But then Wish You Were Here played again…

There is a kind of nostalgia that isn’t exactly a longing for the past, but rather, a longing for the truth you once glimpsed in the past. Music carries this weight uniquely. It is not bound to chronology; it plays again and again, each time offering a new version of the self back to the self, like a mirror curved through time.

The mistake we often make is thinking our youthful defiance must be either glorified or discarded. The point is not to remain who you were at 18, but to carry the intensity of that self into what you do now. 

If Wish You Were Here still stirs something in you then you have not traded your heroes for ghosts. No. The ache is the proof. 

But what of that ache? Do not anesthetize it. Do not turn it into nostalgia, do not drown it in podcasts or scrolls or weekend plans. Use it. Let the song be a tuning fork. Let it ring inside you and hear what is dissonant. You do not need to burn the building down, but you must not become its wallpaper either. 

The corporate self who plays the song in traffic is not a failure of the younger self—he is the test of whether that younger self was real. Can you still feel it, despite the compromises? If the song still aches, still scratches something beneath your ribs, then that idealist is not dead. He has grown into something more enduring—someone who can listen to the same song and extract new meaning without flinching.

It is easy to curse the cage. Harder is to turn the bars into strings—and play music through them.

At eighteen, one thought freedom was in rejection—burning bridges, mocking the herd, thriving on shock appeal. And that was necessary. But freedom is harder now. It asks more. It costs more. The fire of youth was beautiful, but untested. Now, you walk through the world not as flame but as coal—burning slower, deeper, more dangerously. To stay awake inside a system designed to lull you to sleep—to carry the fire inside a shirt and tie—that is where the song becomes useful again. To have a job, to sit in traffic, to live the rhythm of structure—these are not in themselves condemnations. What matters is whether you move through them awake. Whether you can still tell a green field from the cold steel rail.