If life is suffering, why keep going?

If you would like to join the studio audience for our next live conversation, become a Big Think Member and register here: https://link.bigthink.com/4rV94aT If life is defined by suffering, why do we keep going? Arthur Schopenhauer is most famous as being philosophy’s great pessimist. But his philosophy is more complicated — and perhaps more useful — than simply saying that life is miserable. In this conversation, I speak with Schopenhauer scholar David Bather Woods about why desire so often leaves us dissatisfied, why boredom can be a form of suffering, and why moments of happiness seem so fleeting. We explore Schopenhauer’s controversial claim that it may have been better never to have been born, his similarities to Buddhism, and his influence on thinkers such as Nietzsche and Freud. But Schopenhauer also believed there were ways out of the cycle of wanting: art, compassion, attention, and moments in which we temporarily forget ourselves.