Ars Technica deputy editor Anderson’s In Emergency, Break Glass: What Nietzsche Can Teach Us About Joyful Living in a Tech-Saturated World (Norton, May) explains the philosopher’s relevance to the digital age.

Could you summarize some of what you learned from reading Nietzsche?

I was feeling some of this technology-driven malaise that I think a lot of people are feeling. I found that his ideas, though not often framed as being about technology, resonated with what I was going through. One example is his critique of our need for both ease and safety. He refers to a religion of comfortableness and argues that people had made a religion out of this need to be safe and enjoy their leisure time, and those are two of the biggest things that I see technology offering people.

What did he propose as an alternative?

Nietzsche says he needs a straight line, a goal to give him purpose and meaning, the pursuit of which requires difficulty, struggle, and creative exertion rather than what technology offers us by default: endless Netflix streams, or an overwhelming amount of information on Wikipedia.

What about him justifies using “joyful” in your subtitle?

One of the surprising things about him is how much he talks about joy. He doesn’t mean comfortableness, because his life was really uncomfortable. He suffered all his life from an undiagnosed illness that made him miserable. He gave up his job when he was still a fairly young professor because he was so unhappy with academia, and he spent the rest of his sane life wandering around Europe on a modest pension. He was not comfortable. He was not happy. Most of the time he didn’t have any readers. Nobody read his books until he was insane or dead. He had very few friends, and yet he talks all the time about joy.

What did he mean by that?

That this creative exertion, the struggle to overcome ourselves and to be part of the continued evolution of the human story, is the kind of thing that will lead us to the truest, deepest kinds of joys. And those are very different from being comfortable. I think he looked around and saw that he couldn’t be comfortable. It was not going to be possible, given his physical and intellectual makeup. And so, if that was all the world had to offer, if that was the only avenue to joyful living, it was closed off to him. His whole project is a search for a kind of joyful, meaningful existence that does not depend on simpler notions of happiness or comfort.