>>50348
Hopelessness is pretty much totally relative.
Schopenhauer's pessimism was, more than anything, a product of the world around him. At the time, Western thought was reeling from the end of the Enlightenment. To compare it to economics, the humanist bubble had burst, but the dialectic bubble was expanding like crazy. In all of this, Schopenhauer thought the West totally had its head squarely up its ass. He was of course quite right, and saw that many of the West's core values were basically taken on as a matter of faith, and that the driving forces behind man's actions, which to us now might seem patently obvious, were not at all patently obvious. People did not particularly understand incentive, and had the concept of "free will," which is nonsensical. Schopenhauer had little option but to basically declare the whole thing to be a sham and a shitshow. By his own admission, if he had been born and raised in the East, his philosophy would not have been in the least bit novel, and he would have fit squarely into Hindu metaphysics. Nobody would have batted an eye.
But of course he wasn't, and they DID bat an eye, and everyone thought of him as a nasty old man even though he was and still is basically right. All he did, really, is to put Dharmic metaphysics in Western terms, and the language at the time made it come across as very bitter. He didn't know he was doing it until later on, but that's the short of it. In today's world, with a greater understanding of Dharmic thought available to a Western reader (this is assuming someone is serious rather than some jackoff who just read "The Tao of Pooh" or "The Zen of [insert bullshit here]"), we can see that it seems far less hopeless. A reevaluation of one's mental context is all that is needed to correct the emotionally erroneous pessimism found throughout Schopenhauer's works, but even Schopenhauer himself was very tongue-in-cheek about the whole thing, and didn't really give a shit if he came across as being an old misanthrope.
Really, Schopenhauer's works are a breath of fresh air even today. They're straightforward and anyone with a decent head on their shoulders can pretty quickly work out what he's getting at, especially if they have a Dharmic background. He certainly makes a lot more sense than Western thinkers today who are barely more than trumped-up sociologists who are utterly credulous and will drone on into infinity about psychoanalysis without ever really saying a thing. Compared to them, Schopenhauer's self-consistent and bare-bones model of the problem of the ego is still quite relevant. It's just a shame that Nietzsche's somewhat ham-handed attempt at brightening up Schopenhauer's philosophy is all that people really remember Schopenhauer for.