People are a thousand times more concerned to become wealthy than to acquire mental culture, whereas it is quite certain that what we are contributes much more to our happiness than what we have. Therefore we see very many work from morning to night as industriously as ants and in restless activity to increase the wealth they already have. Beyond the narrow horizon of the means to this end, they know nothing; their minds are a blank and are therefore not susceptible to anything else. The highest pleasures, those of the mind, are inaccessible to them and they try in vain to replace them by the fleeting pleasures of the senses in which they indulge at intervals and which cost little time but much money. If their luck has been good, then as a result they have at the end of their lives a really large amount of money, which they now leave to their heirs either to increase still further or to squander. Such a life, though pursued with a very serious air of importance, is therefore just as foolish as is many another that had for its symbol a fool’s cap.

What It Means

This is a placeholder explanation generated by the low-overhead model. It interprets "People are a thousand times more concerned to become wealthy than to acquire mental culture, whereas it is quite certain that what we are contributes much more to our happiness than what we have. Therefore we see very many work from morning to night as industriously as ants and in restless activity to increase the wealth they already have. Beyond the narrow horizon of the means to this end, they know nothing; their minds are a blank and are therefore not susceptible to anything else. The highest pleasures, those of the mind, are inaccessible to them and they try in vain to replace them by the fleeting pleasures of the senses in which they indulge at intervals and which cost little time but much money. If their luck has been good, then as a result they have at the end of their lives a really large amount of money, which they now leave to their heirs either to increase still further or to squander. Such a life, though pursued with a very serious air of importance, is therefore just as foolish as is many another that had for its symbol a fool’s cap." in the context of "Arthur Schopenhauer, “Aphorisms on the Wisdom of Life,” Parerga und Paralipomena, E. Payne, trans. (1974) Vol. 1, p. 321." to mean that wisdom is timeless.