Introduction
Schopenhauer's Aphorisms on the Wisdom of Life starts from a premise: happiness isn't something you can add to.
Most of us tend to picture it the other way around, as something that accumulates. Work hard, get promoted, etc. Save a little every month. Stack up results, and you end up happier than you were before.
But for Schopenhauer, what we call satisfaction or happiness is nothing more than a state in which want and pain have been removed. Getting something feels good because the state of lacking it has ended — not because a plus has been added. This is why he calls happiness negative.
Drawing on Aristotle, he returns again and again to a single principle: what the wise person seeks is not pleasure, but the absence of pain.
Not pleasure, but freedom from pain. That is what the wise person aims at. The reasoning is the same as above: pleasure is only pain having disappeared, and the thing with any real substance is the pain. He adds one more condition here — freedom from boredom — and says that when both are in place, you have the conditions for the only happiness actually within reach.
If that holds, then his conclusion follows: what you should be aiming at is not increasing the good states, but reducing the bad ones.
So what should we do?
Schopenhauer gives 2 answers. Remove the pain you can actually feel, as far as you can. And reduce the wanting itself, since wanting is what produces the lack. If pleasure is only pain having disappeared, then this is the only place reachable happiness can be.
Put as a question:
- ❌ What can I add to make this better?
- ✅ What can I remove to make this hurt less?
The adding side has no end. There's no ceiling on "better," so the moment you reach one, the next one appears.
The removing side is finite. And you already know what hurts, because pain is the thing that gets felt.
But there's no payoff once it's gone. Pain that is no longer there isn't something you notice. So nothing registers as improvement, and it keeps getting pushed further down the list.
Designing your best day works less well than removing your worst one. In Schopenhauer's terms, that is the kind of happiness that is actually within reach.
Conclusion
I read Aphorisms on the Wisdom of Life a long time ago and had completely forgotten what was in that book. I recently came across an article summarizing it, so I wrote this post as a way of going back over the material.
Of his 2 answers, the "reduce the wanting" one is not something I can honestly see myself carrying out. In the society we live in now, the things to want are supplied to you from the outside, and there are plenty of situations where the structure around you requires you to keep pace with them.
The "remove the pain you can feel" one seems more workable. You know what hurts, because you're the one feeling it. That part stayed with me for a while after reading.
Sorry if a lot of this came out abstract! This is my own reading of the book, so if it interests you, please go and read the original.
Thank you for reading!
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