What does Werner Herzog's nihilist penguin teach us?

My personal favourite work of his is "Happy People: A Year in the Taiga". Most of the people are doing immediate purposeful work and are much more present. There is so much resilience (the bear destroyed hut), and there is also tragedy in it as well (the fire).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Happy_People:_A_Year_in_the_Ta...

It has been a while since I read Nietzsche but what exactly does trekking off into the unknown or even certain death have to do with nihilism? Maybe active nihilism but even that would be a stretch, not to mention it would make the penguin inspiring rather than depressing.

Interesting, I've seen videos about this nihilistic penguin the last few days on Instagram... Feels like content regurgitation, but I don't know who's creating and who's recycling it at the moment.

(On HN there's often a story from one site one day, and a few days later the same story reported by a different news site..)

(2017)

History of the meme and resurgence in the last month:

https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/penguin-walking-toward-mounta...

That's how new species happen. Over time, the penguins who get sufficiently tired of all the other penguins' shit march off to the edge of the map, and when they finally get lucky, enough of the smart, independent minded penguins survive to produce a new generation. The new adventure flock eventually garners enough members to march back to the feeding grounds and seize the territory from the loser normy penguins.

Thus the arc of the universe bends towards badass penguins.

I would describe it as a faustian penguin, not a nihilist penguin. The other day there was a story here about a coyote that swam to alcatraz (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46674433).

When we look at an animal that does such a thing, we characterize it as a strange and suicidal act of a disturbed creature hurtling it's life force into the abyss. But when man does the same thing, it is a heroic and uniquely human act of exploration.

If you go onto an island or some mountain range or some other type of isolated pocket of the world, you may be surprised to find that life exists there. But there is only one way in which this is possible: at some point in time, some living thing had to abandon its old world with little regard for its personal survival.

When you factor in the probability of survival in the new world, and the requirement of finding a sexed pair on the other side you realize that this takes many living things, integrated over a long period of time.

Life pushes boundaries and explores new environments. It has to start from something. Clearly some amount of mania is a requisite for success in the long term in order to overcome reason in the short term.

Huh? I was expecting at least one or two Nietzsche or Dostoevsky quotes but this article completely fails to go beyond what is obvious to anyone who has seen those 3 minutes of the documentary.

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