the euphoria of pessimism

Nietzsche once defined “not being able to wait” as one of our most typically human qualities. In culture as in history, all tragedies and comedies are simply the result of someone not being able to wait. If Medea had simply taken the day off? If Hamlet had put things off for even longer? If Arjuna has called the whole thing off? But not being able

We are the species that has sacrificed breath for speech.

There is a special kind of Purgatory that involves waiting for something not to happen.

“What can be usefully postponed can be even more usefully abandoned” (Epictetus).

To admire a misanthrope.

pessimism also has its own ontological argument: existence is that beyond which nothing worse can be conceived.

For optimists, the most perplexing question is how one becomes a pessimist – if one is not born one.

like this – “not being able to wait” itself cannot wait. How, then, should we understand an instantaneous, on-demand, twenty-first-century, “global” culture such as ours, constituted almost exclusively by waiting? Waiting for the subway, waiting for lunch, waiting for a friend, waiting at the airport, waiting to be called, waiting to not hurt,

Schopenhauer once described comedy as “seriousness concealed within a joke.” The inverse is philosophy.