Peter Wessel Zapffe

Most people learn to save themselves by artificially limiting the content of consciousness.

Zapffe identified three psychological or more specifically repressional mechanisms by which individuals artificially limit the content of consciousness and protect themselves from the despair that can ensue from becoming too conscious of the tragic sense of life.

Isolation, anchoring, and distraction.

Zapfa defined isolation as a fully arbitrary dismissal from consciousness of all disturbing and destructive thought and feeling.

Seneca stated that no genius has existed without a touch of madness, and Aristotle claimed those who have become eminent in philosophy, politics, poetry, and the arts have all had tendencies toward melancholia.

More recently, Dean Keith Symington, in his book Origins of Genius, summarized numerous studies which have established empirically a connection between psychopathological states and creativity.

Perhaps at least some of the pathological states common among geniuses is stimulated by their inability to use the repressional mechanisms outlined by Zapffe, resulting in a hyper-awareness of the horrors of the night.

This would explain why the lives of so many geniuses were constituted by periods of severe melancholy, suffering, and inactivity, followed by rapturous and productive states of creativity and ecstasy .

Then moving into the 20th century, philosophical pessimism continued to have a presence in literature and philosophy, but not to the extent that it had in the preceding century.

Perhaps the most notable pessimist in the 1900s was Norwegian philosopher Peter Wessel Zapffe.

His essay The Last Messiah is actually a common entry point into pessimism.

It's quite a short and accessible essay that really paints a picture of human consciousness as being overdeveloped, something that has become pernicious to our own wellbeing because our level of cognitive sophistication has resulted in desires for things like meaning and purpose in a universe where there really is none.