How to Reduce the Pain of Life | Arthur Schopenhauer

The nineteenth-century German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer observed that nature is driven by an all-encompassing force, which he called Will, or more specifically, the Will-To-Live. This force is unconscious, aimless, and blind, and gives rise to an insatiable striving within human beings. We live our lives grasping, craving, and attaching ourselves to external things, and we feed on other living organisms to perpetuate our own existence, all of which is a manifestation of Will. Thus, the will lies at the root of suffering, as our never-ending hunger (and our inability to satiate it) results in an ongoing pursuit of pleasure that never, ever satisfies in the long run. To cope with the misery of life, Schopenhauer took the effort to construct a philosophy to help us attain a state of happiness, which may seem a bit strange as he’s such a pessimistic thinker. But similar to a philosopher and spiritual teacher that lived about 2,500 years ago named the Buddha, Schopenhauer rigorously examined and endur