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.
Pain if something is lacking. Boredom if nothing is lacking anymore.
Another point, perhaps the most pessimistic one, in Schopenhauer’s view is that human beings believe they act for their own principles, yet in truth they act for the “economy of the species”, not for that of the individual. If we look back, people who fought and sacrificed something for an ideal in fact did so for what could be defined as a social artifact. So is everything dictated by Nature? A Nature that, moreover, has never promised anything, is neither good nor evil, but indifferent. It’s man who believes it to be good.
Hence the great Schopenhauerian suspicion: are we the subjects of life, or is life the subject that makes use of us?
Life as a Pendulum
Here is the opening quotation from which this entire journey began. If we look at life as a pendulum, at the midpoint of its swing there’s the time of waiting. We are therefore waiting, constantly projected into the future, expecting something to happen. A promotion, a relationship, a turning point, a notification, a new goal. We live suspended, as if the present were nothing more than buffering. Are we stuck in time rather than moving through it? Or are we stuck in the idea that tomorrow will be better?
This is why, from Schopenhauer’s point of view, life is insatiable desire. Love is no exception. In his conception, pure love does not exist, it’s a cultural ennoblement of sexual desire, a tool of Nature to perpetuate the species. We idealize it, but underneath, the same logic remains.
So what is to be done?
Clearly, the answers are not universal, they depend on one’s subjective view of the world.
Nietzsche, for example, also starts from a similar observation: life is not harmony, but tension, pain, conflict. If for Schopenhauer the Will is a blind force to be silenced, for Nietzsche it is a force to be embraced and transformed. Where Schopenhauer seeks a way out of desire, Nietzsche seeks a way to inhabit it without illusions. As a result, Schopenhauer’s answers do not aim to improve life, but to reduce its friction.
- Art: disinterested devotion to art, which becomes catharsis. Immersing oneself in art to suspend desire.
- Compassion: The word derives from the Latin cum patī, to suffer with. Understanding that suffering is not personal, but belongs to the species, to everyone.
- Asceticism: fully in line with Eastern philosophy, this solution implies a drastic reduction of desires, detachment from the material world, frugality. Even on a sexual level—if humanity were to stop reproducing, it would succeed in defeating Nature.
Following this point of view, if it is not up to us to decide, then we are left to oscillate, but with greater awareness.