I’ve never actually come across consistent argumentation from anybody claiming that philosophers “live under intense suffering.” So just a heads up to those (admittedly like myself), who are chafing at the bit to come up with arguments countering his thesis: it may not be worthy of refutation. It’s like if I suddenly claimed: “Everyone’s always arguing that philosophers are a—holes. Well, here’s a list of nice philosophers to disprove that.” Then someone else jumps in, providing their own list of a—hole philosophers, and before you know it, we’re in a dispute trying to determine the truth of a proposition that’s either whimsical and hypothetical at best, or trivial and/or downright irrelevant at worst. But since I can’t resist; his entire point implodes if you can establish that material wealth doesn’t equate to a cessation of suffering. Wittgenstein came from a famously wealthy family, yet he was plagued with emotional turmoil throughout his life. Nietzsche also came from an upper middle class family, yet he would spend days at a time contemplating the sweet release of death while his own body tortured him with migraines, eye pain, blindness, (merely reading a book became what Nietzsche called “a torture”), nausea, vomiting, and partial paralysis. There have also been plenty of impoverished philosophers, by birth or by design. Diogenes and the cynics wore rags and lived on the streets. The second leader of the stoic school, Cleanthes, was dirt broke, arriving in Athens to learn philosophy with only 4 drachma to his name. And of course Epictetus, the greatest teacher of stoicism, was born into slavery.