"In winter, I do my little wickedness by taking a cold bath outside.”
Zarathustra’s joy is earned through voluntary discomfort.
“In winter, I do my little wickedness by taking a cold bath outside.”
This line reveals more than it pretends.
It sounds playful. It isn’t.
Zarathustra smiles but with grinding teeth.
Cold bathing in winter isn’t asceticism for its own sake.
It’s a test. A game. A self-imposed ordeal.
The wickedness lies in deliberate defiance of softness.
Where others seek warmth, he seeks the bite of ice.
Where others wrap themselves in comfort, he chooses shock, sensation, pain.
There is no virtue here in the moral sense.
There is sovereignty.
Cold is not evil. Nor is pain.
But in choosing it, one proves dominion over instinct.
He does not avoid suffering, he plays with it.
He turns struggle into a ritual.
Not for purity, but for power.
Not to be cleansed, but to be tempered.
Cold bathing is part of my own discipline.
No shower compares to the brutality of the real cold.
No comfort compares to the lucidity that follows.
Every plunge reminds me that weakness is learned,
and strength is reclaimed through small, consistent acts of resistance.
Even in winter.
Especially in winter.
That’s the lesson:
Your little wickedness should be yours.
Not immoral, not destructive: just unnecessary pain chosen voluntarily,
to prove you are still in command.
The world softens you.
Wickedness keeps you sharp.