There's something quietly radical here: Freud isn't offering the tired consolation that suffering builds character. Rather, he suggests that beauty itself—not virtue, not wisdom, but actual beauty—emerges specifically *through* the lens of time and distance. The struggle you endure today won't become meaningful because you learned something; it becomes beautiful because you'll see, years hence, how fully alive you were in the midst of it. A parent exhausted by sleepless nights with a newborn might, at forty, look back not with gratitude for the lessons learned, but with an ache of recognition at their own fierce presence in those years—the way they showed up, wholly and without reservation.