The Joyful Wisdom · Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche
56.
_The Desire for Suffering._—When I think of the desire to do something, how it continually tickles and stimulates millions of young Europeans, who cannot endure themselves and all their ennui,—I conceive that there must be a desire in them to suffer something, in order to derive from their suffering a worthy motive for acting, for doing something. Distress is necessary! Hence the cry of the politicians, hence the many false, trumped-up, exaggerated "states of distress" of all possible kinds, and the blind readiness to believe in them. This young world desires that there should arrive or appear _from the outside_—not happiness—but misfortune; and their imagination is already busy beforehand to form a monster out of it, so that they may afterwards be able to fight with a monster. If these distress-seekers felt the power to benefit themselves, to do something for themselves from internal sources, they would also understand how to create a distress of their own, specially their own, from internal sources. Their inventions might then be more refined, and their gratifications might sound like good music: while at present they fill the world with their cries of distress, and consequently too often with the _feeling of distress_ in the first place! They do not know what to make of themselves—and so they paint the misfortune of others on the wall; they always need others! And always again other others!—Pardon me, my friends, I have ventured to paint my _happiness_ on the wall. ----- Footnote 7: Allusions to the song of Clara in Goethe's "Egmont."—TR.
Text from Project Gutenberg, public domain in the United States.