Everyone is a one-time miracle.
―Nietzsche, Schopenhauer as an Educator
The end of the year is always a time to reflect/doubt life, although this is due to the illusion of the popular concept of time: in fact, time has always been there, and it is not only at the end of the year that people realize that a year has passed.
But no one can escape the customary time, just as every day is equally important in life, but it does not prevent people from paying more attention to festivals and anniversaries.
Heidegger argues in Basic Concepts of Metaphysics that time is the cause of people's boredom and anxiety.
The boredom and anxiety of this presence is not in the consumption of time and the waste of time per se, but in the thinking and doubt of the person himself caused by these two acts.
In an episode of the anime "Love, Death Robot", the astronaut male protagonist's spaceship is shipwrecked in a galaxy far away from the earth, where the galaxy spider constructs a beautiful dream and provides the male protagonist with hospice care. And when the male protagonist began to doubt everything around him, when he really woke up, he saw the giant spider that appeared, and returned to the dream in fright.
This kind of plot science fiction movie abounds, such as The Matrix.
These episodes touch on an essential question: if someone told you that everything around you was an illusion, that life was just a dream, and that the real situation was more cruel, would you choose to get drunk or face reality?
Schopenhauer to Nietzsche is such a person.
Nietzsche was shocked to come into contact with Schopenhauer's ideas, and people said that "a lifetime is used to cure childhood", and Nietzsche used decades of philosophical activity to overcome Schopenhauer.
Nietzsche criticized Schopenhauer until the year before his mental breakdown, complaining about the pessimism that Schopenhauer brought him.
This is not to say that Nietzsche did not approve of Schopenhauer, just as Hume alerted Kant, it was Schopenhauer who woke Nietzsche and allowed Nietzsche to discover the truth of life/philosophy.
So Nietzsche called Schopenhauer an educator.
But Nietzsche is not content to remain in despair, and since metaphysics (traditional philosophy) is no longer possible, he will overcome metaphysics; since God (the highest value) is dead, he will reevaluate all values; since after God dies, man will die, then become superman!
Nietzsche, as a philosopher, truly interprets the heroism of Roman Rolland: after recognizing the truth of life (philosophy), he still loves life (philosophy).
There are many life educators like The Time of The Wind, the Giant Spider in Science Fiction, and Schopenhauer. Everyone may be reminded by their own educator to produce "enlightenment" moments.
The educator may also be in a particular place, for example, a hospital.
The magic of the hospital is to build a huge imagination for the people in it: if there is a malignant tumor in the body, if the physical examination results are very bad, if there is only one year left in life...
Even accompanying family members and visiting patients will "experience" illness and death in the hospital.
The hospital is like a survival experiment, in which people will find that many of the things they usually care about are not important, such as work, money, shopping, rank, and status.
Ordinary people should be thankful for death, and death is the fairest thing for all until the technology advances to the point where the rich can improve their genes and significantly extend their lives.
It is also difficult to exchange for a "good death", and a destitute family may also leave peacefully in sleep.
It is precisely because of the "zeroing" of death that people can see the important and unimportant things in life in advance, that is, the so-called "life to death".
This is not monasticism or liberation, nor is it passive avoidance.
It is easy to escape and hate life, but it is difficult to recognize the pain of life and still love life.
Existentialism emphasizes that the meaning of life is the process of life, and living, experiencing, is the meaning of life itself.
Many people may not be able to understand, and always feel that it is a nonsense that "listening to a king's words is better than listening to a seat".
Doesn't it make sense to live the same way?
The difference between humans and animals is that life is only possessed by people, and animals only survive.
The family cats do the same thing every day, lying on the couch lazily watching me leave when I go out, coming back at noon, jumping down, stretching out, eating in sync with me; sleeping in the afternoon, starting to move in the evening, running in the living room, catching small flying insects, playing with toys, occasionally grinding paws, and then sleeping at night.
Cycle.
Although my life also has a fixed path every day: breakfast, work, lunch break, afternoon work, evening home, watching a play, reading, or fitness, etc.
But my life is different every day, and even the same colleagues will have different things (trouble).
Of course, there are surprises.
With the increase of age, the small surprises of the youth are less and less, or that adults buy new toys, school early after school and other things can not be regarded as surprises, just as shopping can not alleviate shopping anxiety, the surprise brought by things can not make up for the emptiness of life.
Even the joy of promotion and salary increase is temporary, and I have not experienced the joy of reading a good book and watching a good movie when I was in school for a long time.
Many of the so-called surprises are the peak loops that abandon the edges.
Fate is very mysterious, when you especially want something, you do not give it, and when you have passed the stage of most desire and have a dispensable attitude towards something, fate offers it with both hands.
I also remembered that the senior of the light student, if he could persist for a year, would he turn around, would the things that bothered him at that time have disappeared?
The so-called blessings and misfortunes depend on each other, and only when people look back at the whole life before dying can they know where the blessings are and where the disasters are, which things that seem to be blessings at the time are disasters in the long run, and what things are felt to be disasters at the time are actually blessings.
It is concluded that only death can end the infinity of man.
Since individuals in the midst of fate can never know what is good and what is bad before death, there is no need to measure their lives with this unknown.
Believe that everything is the best arrangement.
Even if you encounter the saddest threshold at the moment, and the things you want the most are all gone, don't give up, live, there is a possibility of change.
The only object of life is one's own heart, that is, the true self.
Nietzsche hated "brainless haste", he hated "the faster and faster pace of life".
That rush, that breathless race for every second, that impatience to pick all the fruits without waiting for maturity, that kind of competition that you chase after me, it carves a deep groove in people's faces... As if there were a potion working in them, so that they could no longer breathe calmly, they lunged forward with a ghostly heart, like slaves branded with the imprints of the Three M's —Moment, Meinung, Moden. ―Nietzsche, Schopenhauer as an Educator
Today's environment is even worse than Nietzsche's, people are not only busy with their bodies, their attention cannot be idle for a moment, and information bombardment such as short videos is pervasive and makes people have no heart to think.
But there are always life educators like Schopenhauer who remind people to think about "who I am" in times of rush.
"Your true educator and shaper reveals to you what is the true original meaning and principal material of your essence, something uneducatable, unshavable, but certainly something that is difficult to touch, bound, paralyzed: your educator can do nothing but be your liberator."
May everyone meet their own educator, find and become themselves.