Self-conquest As a Lifestyle

“After having lived my entire life in a sort of lie, I must create a truth.” ~Albert Camus

If you have not yet conquered yourself, you are living your life in a comfortable forgery. You are surrounded by autonomous imitation, outflanked by counterfeit culture, and dwarfed by an absurd universe. Society hands you a script: consume, obey, achieve, belong, and you perform your role so convincingly that you forget it’s scripted.

Camus’ quote lands like a hammer because it names the moment the forgery is transformed into a forge. It cracks the matrix, and the sudden, nauseating clarity that your life has been built on borrowed truths, secondhand meanings, and unexamined habits hits you like a punch in the soul.

Self-conquest begins right there, in the hot fire of the forge. In the pain after the soul punch. In the forge, you become a rebel: the part that wants comfort is overthrown by the part that demands lucidity. No mercy. No excuses. The chisel of self-inflicted philosophy goes to work on the hardened beliefs inside you, carving away everything that is not essential.

Let’s break it down…

Conquer absurdity with greater absurdity:

“Extreme positions are not succeeded by moderate ones, but by contrary extreme positions.” ~Friedrich Nietzsche

Reality is inherently absurd. It’s harsh, cold, and indifferent. The cultural lie tries to patch over this with ready-made truths: religions, ideologies, careers, personas. The self-conqueror rejects the patch job. Instead, like an artist confronting a blank canvas, he answers absurdity with greater absurdity: he creates.

The fiction writer lies beautifully so truth can breathe. The mythmaker spins out gods so the soul can breathe. The painter imposes color so the void might finally be seen. Self-conquest is this same gesture turned inward. You conquer the absurdity of your own existence by imposing upon it the greater absurdity of deliberate, lucid creation.

Your life becomes a work of art. Every habit you break, every belief you question, every ‘truth’ you dismantle is a brushstroke. You do not solve the absurd; you dance with it. You color in the void. You dance inside the abyss. You rearrange the nightmare. You transform Hell into heaven.

This is revolt in its purest form: not against the world, but against your own fallible perception of it. The self-conquering artist does not seek permanence. He seeks the next confrontation with the blank canvas.

Practice discipline disguised as mischief:

“Nothing so promotes the growth of consciousness as the inner confrontation of opposites.” ~Carl Jung

Self-conquest is discipline disguised as mischief. It runs on three vital factors: lucidity, humor, and relentless self-infliction.

Lucidity keeps the eyes open. No rose-colored glasses. No spiritual bypassing. You force your head over the edge of the abyss and stare into it until you see the light. You Superman stare until your laser beam gaze burns off all the dross. Until your comfort zone collapses in on itself. Until your mortal dread transforms into immortal humor. Until God falls off his pedestal and gets caught in the brambles of hell.

Humor is the sacred clown medicine that keeps the gaze from breaking you. It lets you mock your own seriousness, stretch your own comfort zone, and hold the tension between opposites. It keeps humility ahead of hubris. It smears Yin into Yang. It transmutes Anima into Animus. It outbluffs the gods.

Self-infliction is the chisel itself: ruthless self-interrogation, the daily removal of cultural conditioning, the willingness to become your own savior. When you inflict yourself with philosophy you are one-upping your fragile ego with your anti-fragile soul. In the throes of self-infliction there is no place for self-preservation, only self-overcoming. Laurels are wasted. Certainty is outmaneuvered by curiosity.

These practices turn the Mobius strip of reality/lie/truth/art into a spiral you ride. You corkscrew through it. You create a truth, live inside it fully, then when it begins to harden and calcify, you inflict the next necessary heresy upon it. Fallibility is honored, not feared. Rebellion is turned inward first, outward second. The Beginner’s Mind is reborn every time the Master’s Complex gets too comfortable.

Teach by provocation rather than prescription:

“Put away the safe and healthy prescriptions of an anodyne age and go on a thirsty rampage. In the drunken swirl of the carnival trance, the terrifying gravity of life is made lighter.” ~Jonny Thomson

You cannot conquer yourself by prescription. Your family prescribed you a home. Your culture prescribed you a box to think inside of. Your ego prescribed you a comfort zone. These were necessary for your formation, but they are a hinderance to your self-conquest. Escape the nest. Recondition your cultural conditioning. Transform your comfort zone into a horizon.

Provoke your comfort. Incite your complacency. Interrupt your anodyne state. Dig up your inner beast. Allow him to roam freely in the courtyard of your decadent domesticity. Let him howl through your pretense until your false armor slides off like outdated skin.

In the safehouse of your satisfaction be the provocateur. Ruffle your own feathers. Learn how to relearn. Kill the Master’s Complex; resurrect the Beginner’s Mind.

As Bruce Lee said, “learn the Form, master the Form, forget the Form.”

Recycle your mastery. Sell your certainty and buy curiosity. Marvel at marveling. Be in awe of being in awe. Don’t settle, mettle. Mix it up. Pull God into Hell.

Live as a question mark instead of an answer:

“The roll of the artist is to ask questions not answer them.” ~Anton Chekov

The human condition is hung up on being complete. Hung up on finding an answer. Hung up on discovering the “one true God.”

But the first lesson the self-conqueror learns is that there is no such thing as complete. There are no final answers. There is no one true God when everything is already God. There are only questions. So, foremost, a self-conqueror is a question mark scythe slicing through the false pageantry of placating pretense and insufferable surfeit.

People who think they need completeness, answers, and gods, are vainly attempting to conquer the world. Forgetting that self-conquest surpasses world-conquest. Power over others is tyranny; power over yourself is majesty.

Self-conquest is anti-foundational play: not the quest for a single Truth, but the art of moving fluidly among provisional truths, perspectives, masks, personas, and self-constructions while discovering elevated interconnectedness. A conqueror of self thrives in uncertainty by refusing to be pinned down to one thesis or one identity or one answer.

When you finally conquer yourself, you reflect the world like a mirror. You receive but do not keep. You absorb but do not cling. You learn but do not dwell. You question but remember to never settle upon an answer. By conquering the self, you conquer the world by the way.

Embrace mortality as the ultimate blank canvas:

“Change alone is eternal, perpetual, immortal.” ~Arthur Schopenhauer

Existence is relentlessly in flux. In this ceaseless transformation, mortality emerges as the ultimate blank canvas upon which the Self is conquered and remade.

To conquer the Self is to dismantle the illusion of permanence—the ego’s desperate clinging to identity, possessions, and legacy. Embracing death dissolves these attachments, revealing life as an open field of potential. Rather than a sentence of annihilation, mortality invites us to paint boldly, knowing every stroke is temporary yet infused with the freedom that only impermanence can grant.

What we call “I” is merely a momentary configuration in the flow of becoming. This recognition strips away vanity and resentment, replacing them with humility and openness. The Self, once conquered, no longer demands constant validation; it becomes a willing participant in life’s flux rather than a reluctant victim.

Mortality, as a blank canvas, compels creative urgency. Without the horizon of death, projects stretch into lazy infinity, and passions dull into daily habit. Awareness of finitude sharpens the brushstrokes of daily existence—relationships deepen, work becomes purposeful, and risks become worthwhile. Change, being the only immortal force, ensures that no failure is final and no masterpiece endures unchanged. By internalizing this, we conquer the Self’s paralyzing perfectionism. We experiment, err, and evolve, treating each phase of life as a fresh layer on the canvas. The conquered Self does not mourn the passing of forms but delights in their renewal, aligning personal will with the universe’s perpetual motion.

This conquest unfolds through daily practice: meditation on impermanence, acts of selfless service, and the cultivation of detachment without disengagement. Resisting change breeds suffering, while flowing with it yields transcendence. The blank canvas of mortality thus becomes a mirror, reflecting back our freedom to redefine the Self at every turn.

Ultimately, embracing mortality as the ultimate blank canvas transforms the conquest of the Self into an art of joyful surrender. Eternal change is not a threat but an invitation: to create without clinging, to love without possession, and to exist fully within the fleeting moment. In this light, death ceases to be the destroyer and becomes a muse. The conquered Self steps aside, allowing life’s immortal flux to paint through it: bold, transient, and alive.

Image Source:

Walker On a Sea of Stars by Julian Majin

About the Author:

Gary Z McGee, a former Navy Intelligence Specialist turned philosopher, is the author of Birthday Suit of God and The Looking Glass Man. His works are inspired by the great philosophers of the ages and his wide-awake view of the modern world.

This article (Self-conquest As a Lifestyle) was originally created and published by Self-inflicted Philosophy and is printed here under a Creative Commons license with attribution to Gary Z McGee and self-inflictedphilosophy.org. It may be re-posted freely with proper attribution, author bio, and this statement of copyright.