There is something deeply strange about knowing what a stranger had for breakfast. Not a friend, not a neighbor, but a person you have never met and almost certainly never will. Yet millions of people wake up each morning and reach for their phones to find out exactly this. They scroll through the curated lives […]
The Celebrity Obsession: Schopenhauer on Why We Worship Vain Fantasies Read More »
You have probably lost an argument to someone who was completely wrong. Not because they had better evidence. Not because their logic was sharper. But because they knew how to fight dirty with words while you were busy trying to be reasonable. Arthur Schopenhauer knew this would happen to you. In fact, he wrote an
The 5 Schopenhauerian Phrases to Dismantle Any Argument Read More »
You scrolled for forty minutes last night. You know this because your phone told you so, in that passive aggressive weekly report it sends like a concerned parent. And what did you gain? A vague sense that everyone is on vacation, everyone is in love, and everyone has better abs than you. This is not
Why Your Instagram Feed Never Makes You Happy (A Schopenhauerian Answer) Read More »
Arthur Schopenhauer spent most of his life being ignored. He published his masterwork, The World as Will and Representation, at age thirty. It sold almost nothing. He lectured at the University of Berlin, scheduling his classes to compete directly with Hegel, the most famous philosopher in Germany. Students chose Hegel. Schopenhauer lectured to empty rooms.
There’s a curious paradox at the heart of human intelligence: the very capacity that should liberate us from suffering often becomes its most reliable generator. Arthur Schopenhauer, the 19th-century German philosopher who made pessimism intellectually respectable, spent considerable energy exploring why smart people seem to have drawn the short straw in life’s happiness lottery. His
The ‘Genius Tax’: Schopenhauer on Why Intelligent People Often Suffer More Read More »