Arthur Schopenhauer was born in 1788 and died in 1860 and spent the intervening seventy-two years being, by a considerable margin, the most comprehensively, systematically, professionally pessimistic thinker the Western philosophical tradition has ever produced.
This is a strong claim. Philosophy is not, historically, a field that self-selects for the chipper. But even in this august company of absolute buzzkills, Schopenhauer is something else. He is the gold standard of philosophical despair. Nobody brings up Schopenhauer unless they want to sound interestingly damaged at a bar. He’s not “rainy day playlist” sad. He’s sad like an MRI result.
“So then why are you writing about him, Eric?”
I understand this is not obviously a good idea. I want you to know that I’ve considered this and pressed forward anyway, which is either the definition of intellectual courage or the definition of the thing that makes people at parties slowly migrate toward the kitchen when I arrive.
The paradox is that reading Schopenhauer’s bleakest ideas can make life feel more manageable, not less.
Schopenhauer is the philosopher you pick up when the cheerful lies stop working.
What I am going to do is tell you what this man was actually trying to convey because stripped of the Academic Gravitas Packaging, what he was saying was:
“Honey, let me explain why you keep doing this to yourself.”
Yes, it’s dead philosopher time again. We’ve covered Camus and Wittgenstein, and now it’s time to look at what is widely regarded as one of the most important books in Western philosophy: “The World as Will and Representation” by Arthur Schopenhauer.
Let’s get to it…
The Will
Permanent satisfaction is widely believed to be attainable through (a) accomplishment, (b) acquisition, or (c) the correct number of throw pillows. This belief is incorrect.
Schopenhauer’s core party trick is brutally simple: desire is the primary condition of conscious life. Wanting isn’t a problem that happens to consciousness; wanting is what consciousness is.
We aren’t minds that occasionally desire things. We are desire-machines that occasionally experience brief interruptions.
And what about permanent satisfaction? The stable, lasting “Ahhh, I’ve arrived, I’m finally done” state people daydream about? Schopenhauer says that’s impossible.
Because the moment you satisfy a desire, one of two things happens:
- A new desire spawns immediately.
- Or worse: you get bored.
So life becomes this exquisite carousel of:
want → pursuit → brief relief → adaptation → new want
This pipeline is so reliable that it is used in several countries to generate hydroelectric power.
You want the job. You get the job. For two weeks you’re like, “I am a professional. I am going to buy a fancy pen!” Then your brain adapts and suddenly you’re just a person who has to answer emails until you die. You grind for years thinking: “When I get that thing, I will finally be fine!” And you get the thing, and your brain goes: “Nice. Anyway. What’s next?”
Now before you dismiss this as just one gloomy philosopher’s hobbyhorse, let’s see if anyone else agrees…
And Buddhism says: “Yes, that’s correct. Life is unsatisfying and craving is the root of suffering.” Different metaphysics, same diagnosis.
Then modern science kicks the door in like, “HELLO, I HAVE DATA!” The mechanism is called “hedonic adaptation”, the process by which your nervous system quickly reclassifies any new good thing as the baseline, normal, the floor rather than the ceiling.
Still not buying it? Let’s get the ultimate evidence. Buddhism agrees, science agrees, and most importantly…
Taylor Swift agrees.
Taylor Swift has built an entire career on unending desire. Every album is a new chapter. Every chapter promises resolution. Every resolution opens into new longing. The Eras Tour can be read as an archaeology of her own wanting: look at all the things I wanted, look at how I got them, look at how the wanting continued. And the audience wept with recognition and then drove home still wanting, which is the correct response to the work and also the demonstration of everything Schopenhauer said.
“You’re comparing Taylor Swift to a 19th century German philosopher who thought life was an unquenchable spiral of desire?”
Yes. And you can’t stop me, but more importantly, you can’t tell me why I’m wrong, which is the part that should bother you.
“Fearless” is an album about wanting love and believing that getting it will be the end of the story. And “Speak Now” is what happens when reality declines to cooperate. “Red” is the album that discovers wanting can intensify even after attainment. “1989” ends with “Clean,” a song about finally being free of a desire, and the freedom sounds like emptiness. “Midnights” brings “You’re on Your Own, Kid” which compresses an entire life of wanting into a few verses and arrives at the understanding that the wanting was the thing all along, that there was no destination behind the desire, just more desire.
Three esteemed traditions and one pop superstar. Two and a half millennia. One conclusion: the wanting doesn’t stop, the getting doesn’t fix it, and the gap between what you have and what you want is a permanent architectural feature of consciousness and not a temporary inconvenience en route to some permanent state of okayness that is coming.
(To learn how philosophy can help you find meaning in life, click here.)
Ooookay, so what do we do now?
The first step is quite simple and therefore rarely done…
Acceptance
The world is not designed for your happiness. Fairness is not real in the way you want it to be real. Life involves suffering.
Accept this, genuinely, in your bones, and something extraordinary happens…
No, not clinical depression.
You stop being constantly, structurally, grindingly disappointed.
Disappointment is not caused by your circumstances. It is caused by the gap between your circumstances and your unreasonable expectations. Close the gap and you have removed the primary thing that causes most of your suffering.
(To learn how philosophy can help you stop negative thoughts, click here.)
Yeah, I know: still not terribly pleasant, right?
There are other ways we can address the issue. Not with magical thinking. Not with “just be positive.” But with modern strategies that essentially say: Fine. If the system is rigged, we’re going to learn the rigging and exploit it. (For the record, Schopenhauer would probably hate much of what follows.)
Flow
“Enjoy the journey, not the destination!”
I know. I KNOW. That is said by corny life coaches and people who sell courses and people who have done a retreat and come back different in ways that make them harder to eat dinner with.
I need you to separate the concept from everyone who has ever said it, because the concept is actually coming from Schopenhauer himself, who was the least poster-quotey person who ever lived.
If satisfaction at the destination is always temporary and disproportionate, then the only rational strategy is to derive meaning from the journey. The journey isn’t a consolation prize. It’s the only prize that actually exists.
You stop asking, “Will this achievement make me permanently happy?” and start asking: “Is the pursuit itself something I would enjoy?” Because the pursuit is what you will spend your actual life doing.
The goal’s function isn’t to be achieved. It’s to organize your attention toward a pursuit that’s worth doing while you’re doing it. You can’t stop wanting. You can, however, want things that pay you back during the chase.
This is where flow research comes in. Developed by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (yeah, guy had a name that looked like your keyboard fell down a flight of stairs), “flow” states are those periods of total absorption in something challenging, where you lose track of time and your internal narrator shuts up for five minutes.
And what he found is that people in flow are not just “fine” or “occupied.” They are, neurologically, genuinely experiencing pleasure. Not “this will have been worth it” pleasurable, not “I’ll feel good when I’m done” pleasurable, but right now, while it’s happening pleasurable, in a way that achievement, which is always past tense by the time you feel it, is not.
Pick pursuits where the daily act of doing them is intrinsically meaningful: learning, building, making, training, writing, solving, practicing, helping.
If your pursuits are only tolerable because of what they’ll “get you,” you’re building a life you can’t stand living in. The move is to want things whose pursuit is worth doing. Because the pursuit is what you’re actually going to get.
(To learn how to add more flow to your life, click here.)
How else can we thrive in Schopenhauer’s world of endless wanting?
Gratitude
We like the idea of gratitude because it sounds wholesome and non-threatening, like a golden retriever wearing a bandana. It sounds like the opposite of Schopenhauer’s gloomy vision of the world.
But, oddly, for gratitude to be effective it requires some Schopenhauer.
Gratitude is a contrast effect. To feel grateful for X, you have to see that X could be absent. Schopenhauer’s perspective that good things are exceptions rather than defaults sets up the contrast gratitude requires.
When you stop assuming comfort is your birthright, comfort becomes vivid. When you stop assuming life should be fair, moments of decency feel meaningful.
You cannot be grateful for what you experience as owed.
If your brain labels comfort as “normal,” then comfort becomes invisible. But if you assume life is not obliged to be kind, then even modest goods land harder. A quiet morning. A friend who shows up. A meal that tastes good. These aren’t “default settings.” These are events. Little miracles.
This is where the whole thing turns, unexpectedly, into something human. Because if you start from the premise that life is designed to satisfy you, you will spend your days furious at its frequent failure.
(To learn how gratitude can make you happier, click here.)
But what about other people? How do they play into this?
And what does it have to do with porcupines?
A Unified Theory of Why You Keep Stabbing the People You Love
Love, and all other forms of human closeness, operates according to The Porcupine Principle, which Schopenhauer described and which remains, after nearly two centuries, the single most accurate summary of intimate human relationships ever produced by a man who didn’t appear to be having very many.
The parable goes like this: A group of porcupines are cold in winter. They huddle together for warmth. Their quills stab each other. They back away. They get cold. They huddle again. Stab. Back away. Cold. Huddle. STAB. And they keep doing this until they find the right distance. The exact distance where they are warm enough and no one is being pierced. And then they stop moving. They stay there. That’s the parable.
HOWEVER…
Our current cultural consensus is roughly as follows: that genuine connection requires the full, unfiltered disclosure of the self. That restraint is inauthenticity wearing a mask. That if you are not, at any given moment, “bringing your whole self” to every relationship, every workplace, every mildly awkward dinner party, you are somehow betraying both yourself and the people around you by cruelly denying them access to the full, unedited, unmediated horror show of your interior life:
- “Radical honesty.”
- “Speak your truth.”
- “If they can’t handle the real you, they’re not your person.”
It’s all framed like liberation. But let’s be blunt: this is mostly a justification for being impulsive without consequences.
Schopenhauer thought the idea that genuine relationships require the full, unfiltered disclosure of the self was not just wrong but naïve to the point of cruelty. Why?
Because the “real you,” up close, is not a gentle woodland creature. It’s a porcupine. It has quills. It has irritations, resentments, petty tyrannies, and opinions about how towels should be folded. It has a slideshow titled “Ways You Wronged Me In 2017.”
“Filtering” sounds sinister if you say it the wrong way. But what it often means in practice is something humbler and more human: you don’t say every thought you have. You choose timing. You soften. You consider what will be useful rather than impulsively cathartic.
The most stable couples aren’t the ones who say absolutely everything that crosses their minds. They’re the ones who maintain a floor of respect even when they’re furious. They can be angry without becoming cruel. They can keep the relationship from turning into a courtroom drama where every argument is Exhibit A in the case of “Why You Are Fundamentally Defective.”
(To learn how to make emotionally intelligent friendships, click here.)
Okay, we’ve covered a lot. Let’s round it up and learn how Schopenhauer’s Eeyore philosophy succeeds in removing the biggest obstacle we face in trying to be happier…
Sum Up
Here’s how Schopenhauer can help you find happiness…
- The Will: Consciousness is essentially wanting with a skull around it. (Schopenhauer’s not cheerful, no. He’s not even adjacent to cheerful. Cheerful is a country he refuses to recognize diplomatically.)
- Acceptance: He’s not screaming “everything is terrible.” He’s saying: stop expecting the universe to behave like it owes you a smooth ride.
- Flow: “Enjoy the journey, not the destination.” Which is very effective and also the most boring thing I have ever typed, and I once wrote a thank-you note for a gift of decorative napkin rings.
- Gratitude: You cannot be grateful for what you experience as owed. Schopenhauer’s perspective is precisely what makes real gratitude possible by reintroducing contrast.
- The Porcupine Principle: Put two “whole selves” in a small space and you don’t get intimacy; you get Godzilla vs Mothra. Filtering (politeness, tact, restraint) isn’t betrayal. It’s the lid on the blender.
Ironically, accepting Schopenhauer’s worldview actually removes the biggest layer of suffering we experience.
Because most of your suffering isn’t pain. Most of your suffering is the demand that the pain shouldn’t be there. We have pain, and then we have the extra layer of outrage that pain exists, as if life has violated its terms of service.
When you accept that life’s baseline includes frustration, loss, and disappointment you stop saying, “Why is this happening to me?” as if you’ve been singled out by the gods. You start saying, “Oh. Right. Life can be hard.”
And life can be hard. Stop expecting the world to behave like it’s personally invested in your comfort. The universe is not a boyfriend who forgot your birthday.
Schopenhauer’s philosophy is basically a manual for working with reality as it is rather than as you wish it were. Most of us spend a lot of time wishing reality would stop doing reality.
But reality is not your enemy. Your fantasy is. And the moment you stop trying to win a fight with the basic terms of existence, you can finally put that energy into living inside them with a little more skill, a little more humor, and a lot less self-betrayal.
That’s the strange comfort in Schopenhauer: once you stop expecting life to be painless, you can start noticing that it is still, sometimes, beautiful.
Two hundred years later, the most pessimistic philosopher in history still has the most calming message: you were never promised a good time. Life is difficult and the sooner you make peace with that, the sooner you can get on with enjoying the parts that aren’t difficult, which are more numerous than you think.
