We know that every life contains a good deal of suffering. However, what counts is how we respond to it. Schopenhauer recommends a limiting of desire and resignation from life. While Nietzsche recommends an artistic response to the tragedy of life and an embracing of the suffering it entails. The best response, really, might be to laugh, writes Joshua Foa Dienstag.

“If there are happy people on this earth,” wrote E.M. Cioran, “why don’t they come out and shout with joy, proclaim their happiness in the streets? Why so much discretion and restraint?”

Some people have easier, more privileged lives than others, but all human lives contain suffering and some contain a great deal of it. Centuries of technological progress, although relieving some sources of extreme distress, have on the whole not made humans much happier, as numerous studies confirm. What explains the persistence of suffering and what attitude should we take toward it?

SUGGESTED READING Hobbes vs Rousseau: are we inherently evil? By Robin Douglass One powerful answer to this question was offered by Arthur Schopenhauer, the German philosopher born in 1788 whose book of pessimistic essays Parerga and Paralipomena (“Appendices and Omissions”) became wildly popular after its publication in 1851. “Life,” he famously wrote, “is a business that does not cover the costs.” Human desires, he thought, would always outstrip the world’s potential to satisfy them, leaving each individual in a kind of permanent deficit.