Unlike his primary predecessor, Arthur Schopenhauer, who proposed that suffering is best minimized and avoided to the best of one’s ability, Nietzsche argued that suffering is a good thing that should be leaned into, embraced, and used as fuel toward the amassing of strength and psychological power. Life is in fact inevitable suffering, and so, it is not a matter of if, but for what? “The meaninglessness of suffering, not suffering itself, was the curse that lay over mankind so far,” Nietzsche wrote.
