A person to whom everything is freely given can never understand the value of those things.

Hardship can make a person worse. I'm sure we all know people who have become bitter because of the pain life has handed to them, and usually I find myself unable to truly blame those people. Hardship can break people.

But I also find that people who have never truly had to work [for something - not "job" work, all work], first do not understand the work that others have to do, and do not appreciate what they have. I recently read an update to a thread in r/relationships about a woman whose daughter was getting married for the third time and was pitching a fit because the parents didn't want to pay for this third wedding, as they'd paid for the first two and their following divorces. That daughter was handed money her entire life to subsidize her existence and it clearly had made her insufferable, entitled, etc. Some hardship is necessary, or we'd all be entitled assholes who think we just deserve everything to be handed to us.

I think hardship helps us to learn who we truly are as people. You don't know who you are until push comes to shove. I mean, that's what a lot of sci-fi and disaster fiction is about, right? How awful situations can either warp people into monsters, or people stick to their guns and their ideals. Hell, isn't that basically what The Walking Dead is about? (TV series, anyway, haven't read the comic)

At minimum hardship forces us to learn and examine what we truly value. "Is it more important to feed myself for six months, or use the food I've found to feed myself and three others for two months?" I truly believe we cannot know how we will react in these situations until they occur. We can attempt to predict our behavior based on our knowledge of ourselves but until we get to that point it's all a theoretical exercise, made from the comfort of a reality where currently, we are clothed, loved, and fed. (Presumably.)

We also cannot truly sympathize with people who are suffering unless we have suffered. Suffering gives us empathy. It gives us understanding and depth.

Sounds to me like Nietzsche suffered a lot and was trying to look for the upside, either that or he was a masochist.

I don't think anyone should ever seek out suffering and this quote has the danger of implying that because suffering can have positive effects, it should be sought out and relished. Yet at the same time, we should not flee from discomfort. If you use "personal comfort" as your compass to get through life you are not going to be challenged, and you are not going to grow. This parallels a conversation klein and I had about loneliness a while back. Don't hold up awful things as "noble." Don't cling to them because you think they make you better or special, a special suffering snowflake lilypad.

Let's flip the premise of your title and ask instead:

How can great personal growth be achieved outside of experiencing some type of hardship?

Is "challenge" a hardship? It could be taken that way.

No one needs profound self-contempt. When it is truly profound and all-encompassing I believe it prevents growth. Self-mistrust though - we should doubt ourselves. Not so much that it binds us from acting, but enough so that we see the room in our thoughts for other interpretations, reactions, etc. Enough so that we are willing to listen to others.

I prefer:

Per aspera, ad astra - through adversity, to the stars.

Hate on Nietzche. He was an asshole.

To those human beings who are of any concern to me I wish suffering, desolation, sickness, ill-treatment, indignities — I wish that they should not remain unfamiliar with profound self-contempt, the torture of self-mistrust, the wretchedness of the vanquished: I have no pity for them, because I wish them the only thing that can prove today whether one is worth anything or not — that one endures.

Not so facebooky, is it? That's also Nietzsche, also from The Will to Power, the book of notes that Nietzsche wanted to call The Antichrist: The Revaluation of All Values but he'd long since died of brain cancer/syphilis (jury's out) and his Nazi brother-in-law was busy carving up his works to enrage Der Vaterland into beating the shit out of Russia. Nietzsche was a big fan of Der Vaterland, by the way:

“It is my fate to have to be the first decent human being. I have a terrible fear that I shall one day be pronounced holy.”

Whenever you see a Nietzsche quote, hear it in the voice of Stewie Griffin, or if you prefer, Ren from Ren & Stimpy. He never married, relied on his sister for money and spent his life hating on everyone around him. He was an ass. If he hadn't written so copiously about the Ubermensch he would be long forgotten by now.

As far as the payload of the quote, it's this:

There is no success without hardship.

- Sophocles

Or if you prefer

Thy fate is the common fate of all, Into each life some rain must fall,

- Longfellow

Or

Great art was born of great terrors, great loneliness, great inhibitions, instabilities, and it always balances them.

- Anais Nin

All of which say about the same thing: an easy life is a boring life. Nietzsche didn't come up with that, he just made it vile and verbose.

And now maybe I won't have to spell "Nietzsche" again for another several months. Buy a vowel, fucker.

The Will to Power wasn't Nietzsche at his best, it was Nietzsche at what his fascist sister thought was his best. That said (and admitting that I love Nietzsche), I think it should be evaluated on his terms, as whether it's a useful thing to believe. If you're going to experience hardship (and you are), do you want to do it expecting to endure or to be ground down? If Nietzsche's bombast turns you off, try Marcus Aurelius instead

Unhappy am I because this has happened to me.- Not so, but happy am I, though this has happened to me, because I continue free from pain, neither crushed by the present nor fearing the future

Neitzsche didn't lead an easy life, and thought this was a useful enough thought to paraphrase in his notebook. (And so did Aurelius, I'm sure; if it's possible to trace where it originated other than "everyone says Chrysippus, because of course they do" I don't have the time, education, library or inclination to do it). I think so too.

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.

What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly

-- Thomas Paine

A smooth sea never made a skilled sailor is essentially what I think Nietzsche is getting at. In order for muscle to grow, it must be torn. Growth, whether physical, emotional, artistic or intellectual comes at a cost.

I don't have much more than that to say. That first quote, until we recently moved, was on my desk for years along with "If you will it, it is no dream."

If we're talking quotes that TNG lives by, I have to put forth my grandfather reading Tagore. I slept and dreamt that life was joy. I awoke and saw that life was duty. I acted and behold, the duty was joy. -The "acting" is often painful, but the fruits of the act and even the act itself bring joy, when you let it.

I sound like a motivational speaker, I'm going to stop now :)

I hate Nietzsche and think he's a huge asshole

Which works have you read of his?

The quote you did provide is from The Will to Power which is not his work, at the obvious it lacks his eloquence with words even when saying brutal things.

Who would you this is a better person:

A person who was poor but became rich through constant work and putting aside what they want right now for something later

or

A person who was rich because parents gave them money.

Most people would probably admire and give more credit to the person that suffered and worked for their material fortune.

None of this addresses inequality in society. But it doesn't pretend to do that, either.

And so what ... Nietzsche was an asshole. When did ad hominem attacks say anything about a person's rhetoric? When did that become the standard for judging ideas?

Growth isn't inherent to the struggle, plenty of people are bitter after facing adversity. The only way to grow is to reflect on the struggle and try to make conscious growth after the fact.

Also, everyone is going to define their struggle differently based on their beliefs, values, and experiences, and I don't think Nietzsche succeeds at trying to put such a subjective concept into objective terms.