How do you measure a good life? How do you test a life to see whether it has been worthwhile?

The Egyptians believed that the god anubis weighed your heart to see if it was lighter than a feather.

John Stuart Mill proposed that a good life was that which increased total happiness and decreased

total suffering more than it

contributed to suffering in the world.

It could be measured.

But I think these tests pale in comparison to the test devised by Friedrich Nietzsche in 1882

in his book The Gay Science.

Quote, what if someday or night a demon were to steal into your loneliest loneliness and say

to you, this life, as you now live it,

and have lived it, you will have to live once again and innumerable times again. And there will be

nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy, and every thought and sigh, and everything

unspeakably small or great in your life, must return to you, all in the same succession and sequence.

Even this spider and this moonlight between the trees, and even this moment and I myself. The eternal hourglass

of existence is turned over again and again, and you with it, speck of dust. Would you not

throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who spoke thus? Or have you once

experienced a tremendous moment

that you would have answered him, you are a God, and never have I heard anything more divine?

If this thought gained power once over you as you are, it would transform and possibly

crush you. The question in each and everything, do you want this again and innumerable times

again, would lie on your actions

as the heaviest weight?

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