Source: Dumb Little Man
The key to happiness lies with porcupines.
Strange as it sounds, it’s an idea that was first articulated by Arthur Schopenhauer. He’s a brilliant philosopher and pessimist of epic proportions.
Schopenhauer might not be the first person you’d normally turn to for well-being advice.
This is because of him, all human actions were essentially worthless. He maintained that romance was an exquisite delusion. Women were overgrown and mindless children and marriage were things that required one to be “blindfolded into a sack hoping to find out an eel out of an assembly of snakes”.Needless to say, Schopenhauer was single.
But despite his pessimism, he had a keen awareness of the intricacies of relationships or the problems that they can create. While he took a famously bleak attitude toward the future of humanity, Schopenhauer did suggest that there is one – and only one – key to happiness.
Why We’re All Porcupines
Schopenhauer believed that human beings had an aversion to closeness and were generally uncomfortable with their own emotions. To demonstrate his theory, he put forth a simple parable:
You’re a porcupine. It’s cold out. To stay warm, you need to huddle next to other porcupines, in close physical proximity. But, the moment you are suitably close to another porcupine, you are pricked by his sharp spines. So, you move away where no one can touch you.
Then, of course, you realize that it’s still cold and you’re beginning to freeze. You come back together with your fellow porcupines, holler out in pain at the sharp spines, and retreat again. And so goes the endless dance of human interaction: isolation, intimacy, retreat.
The process will continue, Schopenhauer said, until all the porcupines reach a state of equilibrium, in which they discover “a mean distance at which they [can] most tolerably exist”.
No one is entirely alone, but everyone is still fundamentally isolated. Porcupines, like humans, will always be…
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