“And if thou gaze long into an abyss, the abyss will also gaze into thee.”Friedrich Nietzsche · Știința voioasă · 1882 · aforismul 146
What you gaze at daily doesn't stay outside you: it slowly becomes the way you see the world.
Nietzsche warns that obsessively examining evil, the monstrous, or the absurd is not an external operation: the observer is shaped by his object. The mechanism is familiarization — what you contemplate daily becomes normal, then part of you. A current example: someone who consumes daily content about conspiracies and corruption comes to see deception everywhere, even where there is none, and loses the capacity for trust.
The previous passage showed how the gaze is shaped by its object. But Nietzsche adds something subtler: darkness doesn't enter you by force, but by invitation. You open the door yourself when you seek it out of curiosity, believing you're just a detached observer. It's like someone who watches serious accidents daily, saying they only want to understand what happened. After months, they no longer see roads, only dangers. The difference between studying darkness and living in it is a thinning boundary. The question that follows: how do you know when you've crossed it?
Why it matters A warning for the information age: what you read and watch daily does not just inform you, it reshapes you — choose your abysses carefully.