The Man Who Proved Happiness Is Impossible and Why Getting What You Want Never Works — Schopenhauer

Описание: You have felt this your entire life. You work toward something. You get it. The satisfaction lasts a few days, maybe a week, and then it fades. The wanting comes back, either for the same thing or for something new. You assume this means you wanted the wrong thing, or that the next one will be different. Arthur Schopenhauer would like to inform you that it will not be different. Ever.
Schopenhauer is not a famous name outside philosophy circles. But almost every major thinker who encountered him could not stop thinking about what he said. Nietzsche read his central book at twenty-one and barely slept for two weeks. Freud borrowed his core ideas without acknowledging it. Wagner built his most important music around his vision of existence. Einstein kept his portrait on the wall.
What Schopenhauer figured out — with careful, unhurried thinking and no comfort offered at the end — is that the force driving all desire is blind, purposeless, and has no interest in whether you are happy. He called it the Will. It operates in you as wanting. The wanting produces suffering when unsatisfied and boredom when satisfied. The pendulum swings between these two states for as long as you are alive and does not come to rest.
This video covers what the Will actually is, why the pendulum never stops, what happens when you add other people into the equation, and the three honest ways out that Schopenhauer identified — none of which fix the underlying problem but all of which are real. It also covers what Nietzsche did when he read all of this, which was to spend the rest of his career arguing that Schopenhauer had the right diagnosis and completely the wrong prescription.
No comfort is offered here. That is the point. Knowing clearly how something works is more useful than a story about how you wish it worked.


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