Schopenhauer essay on the vanity of existence

But Schopenhauer has a response. All our striving is in vain because we die; the goal of our being is non-being. He may be mistaken that death implies that our lives have no value, but certainly, they have less value because of death. If you honestly consider the trajectory of our lives from birth to infirmity and death—there is a vanity to life.

Time and that perishability of all things existing in time that time itself brings about is simply the form under which the will to live, which as thing in itself is imperishable, reveals to itself the vanity of its striving. Time is that by virtue of which everything becomes nothingness in our hands and loses all real value.

When Schopenhauer says that all life is suffering he means that all life, that is, everything that lives and strives, is filled with suffering. Life wants, and because its wants are mostly unfulfilled, it exists largely in a state of unfulfilled striving and deprivation. Schopenhauer says it thus:

[vii] Summary – The finitude of existence, the ephemeral nature of the present, the contingency of life, the non-existence of the past, the constancy of need, the experience of boredom, and, most importantly the inevitability of death, all lead to the conclusion that life is pointless.