Pendulum
Life swings like a pendulum backward and forward between pain and boredom. 1 Who’s Schopenhauer Arthur Schopenhauer described himself as an untimely philosopher, one of those people with a vision that stretches far beyond the present. A thinker out of step with his era. A disenchanter of the collective enthusiasm that surrounded him. He graduated in 1813 from the University of Jena, which already placed him within a society elite. Schopenhauer’s Thought According to Schopenhauer, the world is not what it is but a representation, a subjective one. What we call the “I” is merely an abstraction of ours, while what moves everything is the Will. But how do we define the Will? The Will is an irrational, blind, and purposeless force. This translates into desire, the drive toward what we do not have. And in this infinite loop, where the Will drives us to desire something new over and over again, the satisfaction of a desire does not extinguish desire itself, it resets it. His vision was truly untimely, yet if we look at today’s society, this line of thought feels remarkably current. Every satisfied need immediately opens the space for a new one. This incessant cycle produces fatigue—not the tiredness of doing, but the quiet erosion of perpetual wanting. From here, for Schopenhauer, comes human exhaustion. ...