"Nor here is life presented in any way as a gift to be enjoyed but rather as a task, a job to be done; and accordingly we see, in the great and in the small, generalized misery, tireless fatigue, constant urgency , fight without end, forced activity with the maximum fatigue of all the corporal and spiritual capacities. Many millions, united in the towns, aspire to the common good, and each individual, to his own, but for this many thousands fall as victims. Good the mad illusion or the political machinations instigate them to wage war on each other. Then the sweat and blood of the great mass must flow, to impose the ideas of the individuals or atone for their faults. In peace the Industry and commerce, discoveries cause amazement, seas are sailed, delicacies are gathered from all the corners of the world, the waves devour thousands of men. All are agitated, some meditating and others acting, the tumult is indescribable. But what is the ultimate end of all this? Maintaining ephemeral and tormented individuals for a short period of time, in the best of cases with bearable misery and a comparative absence of pain that is immediately lurked by boredom; then, the propagation of that species and its endeavors. In all this manifest disproportion between effort and reward, the will to live from that point of view appears to us objectively as foolishness and subjectively as an illusion that moves every living being to work with the most extreme effort for something that is not It has value. Only on closer examination will we discover that it is a blind desire, an impulse in everything without foundation and motive. " Arthur Schopenhauer The world as will and representation
