When I was a kid I saw a short little animated on either Disney or Nickelodeon. I only saw it once, probably in between shows or something. I can't find it now (someone please fucking find this for me) but, from what I recall, it had two girls and one was like all happy and rainbows and nothing was ever bad, went badly, and she was always happy. The other girl was always followed by a dark raincloud and was sad and had bad luck and all this stuff.

In the end, something happened and the sad, dark girl felt this immense happiness - more happiness than ever before. The moral was, if you are always happy you don't know the value of your happiness. It's all relative. You have to go through the dark points and have a mixture of both happiness and sadness and good things and bad things in order to truly feel. The girl who had been so dark and sad actually came out on top.

This is an overly simplistic take, obviously, but it's message holds true. Similarly, your quote is a simple and accessible way of approaching this topic. The Giver (the book, not the movie) is another one that examines this same idea.

This idea though is different than the idea that "homeless people we pretend don't exist there that "hardship makes a person better". There is a limit to the scope of the Nietzsche quote and the idea in general and there will always be specific and antidotal exceptions that can be used to prove this quote "wrong".

However, in general, I think we can all agree that living in a world with pain and hardship is better than living in a world with no pain and hardship. It is more than simply being able to value what we have and value our happiness and value our lives.

It is because hardship forces us to evolve on a personal, communal, and species-wide level. With challenges, we cannot be complacent in our growth. It allows us to prepare for the worst and be ready for the worst. It forces us to adapt to ever-changing circumstances and allows us to adapt. It allows regular old centipedes to evolve into crazy colored centipedes that sweat poison.

On a personal level, of course a homeless person experiencing immense hardship isn't "good" or going to "make them better." However, the threat of homelessness also keeps a lot of individuals from slacking off and not working. Seeing that homeless person on the street is a tiny little piece of what drives you to do what you do.

On a larger scale, do the homeless also provide some benefit or indirect consequence that we may not see on the personal level? Communities do a lot to attempt to help the homeless - food banks, homeless shelters, local politics. On a national level we have things like welfare and tax incentives for donations and all sorts of things. You may say it's not enough, but that is besides the point. What would a world be like without homeless people? What would we have to do to get there? How would we ever be in such a place? If there were magically no homeless, would it slightly shift the world view of you as an individual or communities as a whole? Would there be some unintended, butterfly effect like consequence to this?

If we look at evolution of species again, we often see that evolution is the result of mutations that persist because they are beneficial. When that occurs, those who did not evolve are often left behind. Similarly, on an individual level, you can't put a zoo monkey in the wild because they wouldn't survive. They haven't experienced the same shit, they haven't learned the same things, and they simply couldn't live. They haven't "evolved" as an individual.

As humans, our biggest evolutions right now are our technology, not our biology. We build cities and spaceships and cell phones. In 1000 years, when we all live on some other planet, the homelessness is not going to be something that held us back but rather a consequence of the choices we made as we evolved to the point where we can travel in space and live on another planet.

Homelessness can be viewed as a side effect of the larger populations' immense growth from hunter-gatherers to massive cities, electricity, businesses, houses, plumbing, infrastructure, etc. One way to eliminate homelessness is to eliminate everyone's home. We can all just go camp in the woods and eat berries together. Problem solved. But then we won't be living on another planet in 1000 years.

Basically, these types of ideas and the idea of hardship and growth as it relates to happiness and success can be looked at on a personal level or on a larger level. We can look at what the hardships do you you, what you do to hardships, and what other peoples hardships do to you. We can also look at how we as a community, nation, and species deal with hardship and how we grow from it.

Okay. It's 4am. I need to sleep again. There are a bunch of half ideas in here. Hope it gets you thinking.