the world is hell and men are on the one hand the tormented souls and on the other the devils in it this is the radical and somewhat depressing view of Arthur schopenhauer the ultimate pessimist he is often dismissed by many as bringing only misery and destruction in his wake and people use this to shy away from his philosophy altogether but if you stay a little longer it becomes clear that shophow has deep insights not just into why we suffer but also how suffering is ultimately inescapable and how we should react to this harsh truth in
this video we'll learn why pain is more powerful than pleasure why humans suffer more than animals and how we can turn the horrors of life into shared comfort and intimacy with our fellow man as always remember that I cannot represent shopen how's philosophy in all of its Rich detail here and I encourage you to read him for yourself to get all of the fine flavors of his thinking but without further Ado let's get started one the downsides of thinking have you ever looked at a dog they seem almost constantly Serene and content with their lot
in life unless something actively awful is happening to them like they're starving or their leg has been chopped off or they're completely abandoned they are just chilled I've often sat back and compared what it takes for your average person to be happy with what it takes for my dog Rosie to be happy and humans don't come off well in the comparison if I made someone Live Like My Dog they would find it miserable and meaningless but Rosie somehow seems to be in complete heaven and shophow can tell us why for shopen Hower humans are always
going to suffer far more than animals because we have the unique ability to think and reflect about ourselves and the world lucky Rosie just does not have the capacity to consider all the questions a human does she cannot wonder whether her life is meaningless she cannot set long-term goals and then fail to achieve them she cannot fall short of an ideal that she has crafted for herself or she has as the here and now and provided all her physical needs are met she is perfectly content with that compare that with your average person we are
constantly worried about the future or judging the past we wonder whether we will ever get what we want out of life we worry that no one will ever love us we hold on to the bitterness caused by other people who have wronged us at every turn our minds compound and multiply the suffering in our lives and this starts young and only gets worse with age when we are just beginning Our Lives we have a world of possibilities we can put our hopes in making our lives seem complete and meaningful by striving to achieve great things
we pile all of our hopes about existence onto a later date but as we age we realize that only a tiny fraction of our goals will ever come to pass and we're lucky if we even get that much in shopen how's view we go straight from Fear of the future to disappointment in the past and we don't take a single moment to enjoy the present and this makes a certain sort of sense schopenhauer doesn't think that we are built for happiness he thinks one of our primary driving forces is a will to life and inate
desire to continue to exist dwelling in a mindful presence does nothing to further this goal we would be much better off constantly striving constantly struggling and constantly suffering to protect both ourselves and our Offspring it's a sort of Darwin pessimism but it's not all bad news there is a small consolation in this view it is tempting when we feel awful or miserable or inadequate to paint this as a problem with us we are defective in some way or our mind is broken or we are uniquely unhappy people but Shar andhow reassures us that this is
not the case firstly he points out that our suffering emanates from something really quite beautiful about us our ability to think consider and reflect and secondly he reminds us that everyone else is in the same boat it may seem like you're the only unhappy person in the world but whenever silence Falls whenever we give into rumination and reflection most of us will suffer in some way even if this suffering is necessary it still hurts and whatever pain you're in you are never even for a second alone we will revisit this point about a community of
suffering in detail later but why is it that suffering seems so much more prominent than pleasure in most of our Lives well shophow has another wonderful insight to gift us here if you want more on floss opy and the art of learning subscribe to my email list the link is in the description two the transparency of Happiness my granddad says you don't know when the good old days were until they're long behind you this is a feeling many of us can relate to it seems like we don't know just how good a situation is until
it has passed into our rearview mirrors but why is happiness so difficult to notice when it's there why do we only recognize Bliss when it has slipped through our grasp and we are stuck wishing to relive those golden times and promising that we would appreciate them if they ever came around again the reason for shophow is that happiness is very rarely visible and if it is it's only ever for a moment this is because shophow views happiness as less of a positive emotion and more like a lack of suffering he thinks happiness is just what
happens when our Wills are unimpeded when all our present needs are met and all our desires are being fulfilled but far from being ecstatic or excited at this most people just react by not being in pain they are not actively suffering yay but this is hardly a counterbalance to the kind of intense suffering people people feel when their needs are not met this invisibility of happiness is one of the reasons schopenhauer is considered a pessimist he thinks we are fundamentally more suited to suffering than to Joy and again his justification for this view is found
in his concept of the will to life what sort of function would happiness or contentment serve for our survival if we were naturally contented beings we would let ourselves get eaten by a bear while we were pondering the intricate layers of our joy for shophow it would just be nonsensical for our natural state to be happiness to quote a famous Australian comedian content homoerectus was eaten by the saber-tooth tiger shophow sometimes gives the impression that it's a lost cause to try and turn this passive state of Happiness into an active one but call me a
naive Optimist I think there is hope there the answer for me can be found in gratitude one of the great admirers and fiercest critics of schopenhauer was friedi ner and in his great work the gay science he speaks of the reluctance humans have to Express gratitude they see it as a mark of their dependency on other people but I think this is nothing to be ashamed of gratitude is like a form of Alchemy it can transform a dull or merely satisfactory situation into one of absolute Bliss and it does this in schopenhauer's Language by reing
in our Wills so that reality exceeds our expectations in early Buddhism many of the monks that went to spread the word of the new religion were insulted beaten and killed and in one ancient Fable a monk who is about to embark on a journey of preaching is asked what he will do if the people there insult him and he says he will be grateful that they don't hit him then he is asked what if they hit him and he responds he'll be grateful that they don't hit him with sticks but what if they hit him
with sticks then he will be grateful that they did not hit him with stones and so on and so forth you get the idea thus the monk transforms a potentially unpleasant situation into a pleasant one by controlling his expectations and reigning in his will so that reality is a pleasant surprise but I would add a little word of caution here it is very easy to preach gratitude as if it is the ultimate single answer to Life's problems but there are times where too much gratitude could lead us astray should we be grateful for an abusive
partner or a job that we hate and yearn to leave or injustices that we could actually change in the real world it seems intuitively we want to answer no and shophow can tell us why happiness is not a motivating emotion it is a sign that everything is fine how it is if things are not fine then gratitude may not be the solution it is here that we must appeal to the wisdom of suffering but if our lives are to some extent doomed to suffering then why do we even go on the answer for schopenhauer is
an eternal trick that we play with ourselves a trick that will be familiar to us all three the happiness lie have you ever had a friend who just will not tell the truth they seem committed to making promises that they will never fulfill every time you believe them and every time it turns out they were talking nonsense you were left wondering why you even have them around but they've been in your life forever so you just put up with it this is how shop andh Hower views our relationship with life itself each time we set
a goal we tell ourselves an extraordinary lie we say that if we achieve this thing we will finally be happy and contented but this is not the case how many times have you said that if only you hit this Milestone had this partner got this promotion then life would be easy and yet every time as soon as the initial High has worn off you are right back to where you started slightly sad and discontented wondering if long-term happiness is forever out of your reach you are not unusual or broken according to shophow this is a
perfectly normal part of the human experience we are designed to play this trick on ourselves over and over again until we finally die and he again appeals to this idea that satisfaction stagnates if we knew the truth that nothing we strive for will make us happy in the long term then we would cease to do anything so we make endless vows to ourselves that this will be the one this will be the thing that transports us from the mundane and the dull to the Transcendent and the sublime but it will never be the one it
just won't and for schopenhauer once we can accept this we can work on slowly unpacking and deconstructing the will to life in his terms we can begin to embrace asceticism the athetic is a figure in almost all the major world relig religions they are the monk the priest The Hermit they are the person that looks at the lot on offer for them in life and says no I'd rather not they deny their will to life and this is how they slowly find peace this is not so they can end life itself but rather so they
can withdraw from having to constantly nourish their dissatisfaction with reality they disengage from their struggle with the world and embrace an inner struggle instead one where they set their own will against the will to life schopenhauer does not pretend that this will be easy as I said just trading in one struggle for another but he says that it is possible to find some peace after the wrestling match is done once we have subdued our own will mastered our desires and managed to constrain them to a reasonable sphere of influence we can find a small bit
of Stillness and contentment in our lives and in some ways this is a recommendation you see echoing throughout history controlling our desires and slowly mastering not only what we do but what we want is a Doctrine preached by everyone from SIA and epicurus to the Buddha and Christ and schopenhauer gives his unique spin on the idea here by painting it not just as a passive process of accepting life as it comes but as an active fight against a mind whose default setting is suffering and a fight that we must be constantly ready to undertake a
new at any moment but this idealized atic ISM seems only attainable for a select few people most of us do not have the luxury to give everything up and hand over our lives to spiritual aesthetic Pursuits so what do we do well schopenhauer has his own Bittersweet consolation for us four a community of suffering you will rarely find humans get closer than we do talking about our pain put two people in a room who have suffered from the same illness or dated the same unpleasant character and they will almost immediately form a strong bond nothing
brings people together quite like shared suffering and shophow gives us the life affirming idea that we always have shared pain to bond over because we are all fundamentally beings who suffer one of the worst things we can think when going through a horrible situation is I am alone no one else is feeling like this it can bring a limited form of comfort by making us feel special but it only does this by making us feel especially hard done by often a key factor in what makes pain a bait is connection feeling like others understand us
and are willing to lend a helping hand I remember when I was at my lowest I had isolated myself from all the people closest to me and I was at the bottom of a self-destructive spiral the only thing that took me out of it was finally reconnecting with some good friends the difference between suffering alone and suffering together was greater than I could ever express made me feel less hopeless more powerful and it put me on the path to fixing my situation to finally getting my life back on track this was only possible because of
the empathy and kindness shown to me by others and this experience made me Kinder it made me more willing to go out and help people just as I had been helped according to schopenhauer this is only natural at the end of his great essay on the suffering of the world he says that our shared suffering should ideally make us see other men in a true light and remind us of what are the most necessary of all things tolerance patience forbearance and charity which each of us needs and which each of us therefore owes this is
one of my favorite passages in all of 19th century philosophy and it is because it at once shows the depth of schopenhauer's pessimism and the Sparks of his vibrant optimism on the one hand we are all in desperate need of one another we all need charity from others because we are helpless beings floundering amidst an uncaring World doomed to the torture of our own minds but on the other hand this compels us to help one another we are fellow Travelers on the same road paved with hot coals in such a situation who can fail to
show deep empathy kindness and compassion to one's fellow human beings I've noticed a slight tendency in the modern age to pretend that other people somehow have it easy that if only we had the opportunities afforded to others that we would be happy we would finally be complete but shophow reminds us that there is not a single person on the planet who is not suffering certainly some of us are more fortunate than others and there are some who have the rough end of the stick in almost every aspect of their life but this need didn't blind
us to the fact that every person in the world has their own struggles their own pain their own unique brand of suffering and just as we stand in need of the charity and sympathy of those around us they stand in need of ours whether we give it to them is our decision but it would be hypocritical of us to expect kindness that we will not extend to others but there is one final question I always like to ask of philosophies like shopen Howers and that is what do we do with them five what to do
next it is easy to look at philosophers like schopenhauer and ask what on Earth we're going to do with this information and one of my strongest held beliefs is that philosophy should be useful it should connect with your life in some way with shopen Hower this is notoriously difficult because at first glance he seems like such an extreme pessimist he talks of the inescapability of suffering the invisibility of happiness and the dishonesty at the core of Our Lives how can someone like this help us won't he just make us feel like our lives are pointless
well call me naive but I think there are many insights in his pessimism and some hints on how to find solace in a cold World firstly it encourages us to accept that life is going to have a lot of pain in it I remember when I was about 16 a friend of mine went through a breakup and because he was also 16 it seemed like the end of the world to him in a moment of misery induced Clarity he said I did not know I could hurt this much what an awful thing to learn it
seemed like the pain of having his worldview challenged was almost as bad as his heartbreak schopenhauer allows us to avoid such situations by showing how life was always going to consist of suffering we will certainly be sad but we won't be surprised secondly schopenhauer's figure of the aesthetic provides some hope for us all of alleviating the cycle of needs and wants that traps Us in unhappiness we can take a little bit of wisdom from other thinkers like epicurus and the Buddha and learn to limit our wants through careful training and Mastery of our own will
obviously this is a huge topic and I can't go into detail about it here but the book on happiness by epicurus is a good place to start as well as the work of stoic philosopher epic tetus lastly shopen how are morphs suffering into something that can bring people together so often when we are hurting we want to rage against the world and wallow in our own misery convinced that our suffering is unique kard talks of this sort of behavior as an advanced form of Despair shopan how warns us against doing this he thinks that a
recognition of the sheer ubiquitousness of suffering should encourage a deep empathy for one another he says we should not greet each other as Sir or Madam but instead as fellow sufferer we are all in the same battered boat and we ought to stick together if we're going to make the best of it what a beautiful thought from one of the most pessimistic philosophers in history as always I encourage you to read shophow for yourself a good place to start is his essay on the suffering of the world you could read his magnumopus the world as
willing representation but it is incredibly long so it's a bit of a difficult place to start if you do go out and read shophow let me know what you took from his extraordinary philosophy if you want more videos on philosophical misery then check out this one to see how dosi can make your life infinitely worse and stick around for more on thinking to improve your life
