Yes Man and Nietzschean Affirmation

The movie Yes Man tells the story of Carl Allen, played by Jim Carrey. At the beginning, Carl is stuck in a rut because he says no to everything. His life is miserable: his wife has left him, his friendships are falling apart, and his boss doesn’t take him seriously. One day, Carl runs into an old acquaintance who’s become a “Yes Man.” The idea is simple: whatever someone asks, you have to say yes. Curious, Carl gives it a try. And wouldn’t you know it? His life starts to turn around. He finds a new girlfriend, gets promoted, and reconnects with his friends.

At first glance, this transformation could be seen as Nietzsche’s dream come true. The all-affirming Yes Man seems to embody the Nietzschean ideal. In The Gay Science, Nietzsche expresses his wish to become someone who always says yes to life (GS 276). I remember watching this movie as a kid and being struck by it. I even tried it myself for a while. That lasted about two months, until my father asked me again to help in the garden. I didn’t want to, so I just said no. That was the end of my experiment, and, like any child, I quickly forgot about it.

Does this mean I failed Nietzsche? It seems like it. I said no, while Nietzsche’s ideal is someone who always says yes. But is it possible to say yes to everything? Would you agree to give someone five euros just because they asked? Would you say yes if they asked you to punch a dog? Or worse, to kill someone? Yes Man would be a very different movie if it went down that path; more like John Wick, where the main character becomes a relentless hitman because some crime boss found the perfect yes-sayer. Thankfully, I didn’t write that version.

Still, this isn’t what Nietzsche meant. And to be fair, Yes Man itself explores the downside of constant yes-saying to every request. Carl’s new relationship begins to suffer because he never says no. To fix things, he has to relearn the value of refusal. The point isn’t that saying yes is bad; the film clearly shows that openness and affirmation are good. It’s exactly what Carl needed to get out of the rut. But there have to be limits. Nietzsche’s affirmation is not about saying yes to every request, it’s about saying yes to every consequence. That means you can say no and still live according to Nietzsche’s ideal, if you affirm the consequences of your response. The key is that you affirm the no. You say yes to the no.

Let’s turn to the thought experiment Nietzsche proposes in The Gay Science (GS 341). Imagine someone tells you that you must live your entire life over again, exactly as it happened, every emotion, every action, every joy and sorrow, all of it repeated forever. Would you see this person as an angel or a devil? Nietzsche names this thought experiment the eternal recurrence of the same. The question is rather straightforward: Would you want to repeat your life? Your answer reveals whether you affirm or deny your life. Some might interpret this as a command to say yes to everything that comes your way. But that’s not quite it. You can still refuse certain things; what matters is whether you can accept the consequences of that refusal. Can you live with it and still say yes to your life?

Nietzsche’s affirmation is about embracing life’s events and experiences, not about blindly agreeing to every demand. The movie shows this quite beautifully. In the film, Carl’s affirmations come in response to requests. And while many of those are worth saying yes to, some are not. More importantly, Carl’s “yes” is not authentic. It’s driven by an external force: a bet he made with a motivational guru. He says yes because he believes he must. For Nietzsche, affirmation should be internal. It must come from within, it has to be your own.

This is exactly what Carl learns by the end of the movie. He wants to say no, but fears doing so will ruin his life again. Saying no to everything is what made him miserable in the first place. The movie even plays with this by having bad things happen to Carl when he tries to say no, which makes Carl believe that the word ‘Yes’ has some special power. The guru eventually tells him there’s no magical power making everything work out when he says yes. Carl has been relying on an external force to justify his choices. In the end, he learns that even a “No” can be affirmative, if it comes from within. Carl learns to affirm life on his own terms.

Yes Man continues to inspire me because it brushes so closely against Nietzsche’s concept of affirmation. It reveals the dangers of denial, but also the illusion of mindless affirmation. Saying yes to every request can mean saying no to yourself. The real task is to affirm your own will, not someone else’s.