On and off again, I've lurked around spaces like this. And I've casually orbited around Nietzsche's works... only becoming familiar to the extent that a few YouTube videos or an out-of-context quote on social media can manage.

My understanding: some of Nietzsche's works take nihilism so seriously, entertaining them so effectively (perhaps even steel-manning), that a reader who isn't careful can conclude Nietzsche is a proponent of nihilism (as we understand the term "nihilism" today). These readers do not make it far enough to the *overcoming* part.

Is my understanding, again as someone who hasn't truly just sat down and read Nietzsche, in the right ballpark?

I have been unable to pull the trigger on reading Nietzsche for a variety of reasons (including "you need to go spend a decade learning German bro" and I'm terrible at learning languages); the biggest reason is that I thought he was asserting a dark worldview lost in utter arbitrary, utterly thoroughly relativistic meaninglessness. As a depressed person I don't want to read someone like that...

If you are shocked at how I could think that, and that turns out to be painfully wrong, you can thank pop-culture for that. Because in pop-culture Nietzsche is either the guy who inspired the Hugo Boss Brigade of the 1940s, or you'll read him and want to commit sewerslide. As if he's some kind of cognito hazard.

tl;dr if Nietzsche didn't scoff at / completely denounce concepts like HAPPINESS, meaning, purpose, values (or the act of valuing something itself), then why on earth is he constantly made out to be the Supreme Doomer?

In some sense it’s an affirmation of life because it disobeys conventional rules, but also it’s kinda meek because it shows you consume mass-market crap and eschew more important things like going on hikes and writing about the literacy crisis.

Yet...here we are

Interestingly, the same kinds of quips were employed by me back when I began writing. However on re-reading my work I felt such cringe, that I forced them out of my style.

Indeed a bed of roses you've gifted, Nietzsche. Indeed you have given hugs to horses like me. Unlike Socrates (who is only capable of gifting castration and whips)

A person who does not know how to discipline their soul—rather than living their life as the whim of the moment dictates—would be better off finding peace for their soul and not living at all. But if they absolutely must live, then it is better for them to do so not as such a free person, but by entrusting the helm of their mind to another—someone who knows the art of governing people. Socrates, in my opinion, you are a priceless gem for someone who has not yet been inspired to walk the path of virtue, but for someone who has been inspired, you are practically a hindrance to reaching the ultimate goal of virtue and finding happiness.

I've read thus spoke zarathustra but I did not take a note and a little bit forgot about it so I need a help for refences