Is not life a hundred times too short for us to bore ourselves?

The line is a sharp, rhetorical rebuke to self-inflicted tedium: if life is already brief, then boredom is not merely unpleasant but a kind of squandered existence. Read in a Nietzschean key, it aligns with his suspicion of complacency and passive “herd” habits—states in which one lets life happen rather than actively shaping it. The question implies an ethic of intensity and self-overcoming: seek experiences, projects, and forms of thinking that heighten one’s vitality instead of dulling it. It also hints that boredom is often a symptom of weak valuation—an inability or refusal to create meaning—rather than an unavoidable feature of the world.