By Friedrich Nietzsche
Weightless. — What, if some day or night a demon were to steal after you into your loneliest loneliness and say to you: “This life is singular — never to be repeated — each moment ephemeral, lost no sooner than it has finished; every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh and everything unutterably small or great in your life has happened, or will happen, and then disappear forever. And what is forever? If each moment is not more than a datum of sensory ‘experience,’ immeasurably brief, to be stored away in the laughably porous safe of memory. The hourglass of existence is not eternal. It is turned once — no more — and when the grains of sand come to rest in the bottom, it is finished! You are deprived of meaning.”
Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who spoke thus?… Or how well disposed would you have to become to yourself and to life to crave nothing more fervently that this ultimate transience? Your hedonic disposition turns to nihilism without warning. “YOLO,” cries the idiot. “Probably because YOLO.”
