Schopenhauer's Will and Boredom, Epicurus's Calm: Taming Desire Instead of Killing It

Think back to the moment right after you got the thing you wanted. A gadget you’d eyed for months, a job you’d been angling for — the first few days are good, no question. Then somehow it becomes the ordinary backdrop of your life, and your mind is already glancing sideways at the next thing. You’d assumed the joy of getting it would last. Instead, what fills the spot is a strange hollowness. Two philosophers looked this never-ending treadmill straight in the face. One drew from it the conclusion that life is therefore suffering; the other drew the prescription that shrinking your desires brings calm.

Schopenhauer and Epicurus. By temperament they’re opposites. One a thoroughgoing pessimist, the other a man content with bread and water in his garden. And yet their diagnoses overlap to an uncanny degree. This piece digs into the place where they overlap. The question is whether you can keep Schopenhauer’s dark insight and still end on Epicurus’s bright note. To say it up front: the two do mix. There’s exactly one knot.

Start with his central idea. Beneath the surface of the world, Schopenhauer saw a single underlying reality, and he called it the “will” (Wille). It’s easy to misread. The will here is not a person’s resolve, the “I’ll work out today” kind. It’s something far larger and more impersonal — a blind drive that keeps everything alive, growing, hungering.

The force that pushes a seed up through the soil, that sends an animal after prey, that makes a person want things without end — all of it springs from the same root. This will has no purpose and no reason. It simply wants. And, crucially, it knows no satisfaction. Fill one want and it wants the next at once. Filling isn’t the will’s goal; wanting is its very nature.

This is where his famous image comes in. A human being rides on this will, so life is like pouring water into a leaking jar. Pour and pour, and it never fills. Not because the jar can’t be filled, but because the moment you fill it, the bottom drops out again.

The pendulum swinging between lack and boredom

From this theory of the will comes his sharpest insight. He explains why life is suffering with a very specific structure.

You want something but don’t yet have it: that state is lack. The shortage stings. So you strive to get it. But what happens once you do? The thing you wanted disappears, and the will that had been aimed at it has nowhere left to go. That empty state is boredom.

In Schopenhauer’s own phrasing, life swings like a pendulum between suffering and boredom. One end is the pain of lack, the other the emptiness of boredom. Fail to satisfy a desire and lack torments you; satisfy it and boredom hollows you out. The pendulum only grazes the midpoint of fulfillment in passing — it can’t rest at either end for long.

What makes this an insight is that he saw boredom not as plain tedium but as the necessary underside of fulfillment. We tend to believe that if we got everything we wanted, we’d be happy. Schopenhauer says the reverse. At the exact point where you have everything you wanted, boredom begins. The proof: the wealthy, who take up hunting and gambling and the chase for stimulation just to kill the boredom.

Why Epicurus said bread and water were enough

Now the other side. Epicurus is often called a “hedonist,” but the life he recommended was not indulgence — it was bread and water, and a few friends. The pleasure he aimed at wasn’t a pile of stimulation but an unshakable mind: in Greek, ataraxia, calm. (The structure of that calm, and its limits, I took up separately in an earlier piece.)

The gist comes down to this. For Epicurus, the highest pleasure isn’t intense stimulation but two absences: no pain in the body, and no disturbance in the mind. The state of having one’s lack filled and reaching equilibrium is itself the peak. A glass of water is sweet when you’re thirsty, but once the thirst is gone, pouring in more doesn’t make the pleasure bigger. So the state of having no thirst is already the ceiling, and chasing something fancier from there is a futile move that only breaks the calm.

That’s why his prescription is subtraction, not addition. He sorted desires into three kinds: the natural and necessary (food, shelter, friendship), the natural but unnecessary (luxury), and the empty and vain (fame, power, endless wealth). Beware that last group, he said. They have no limit, so they’re never satisfied.

Pleasure isn’t a profit — it’s paying down a debt

Here the two men meet. Their surface temperaments are opposites, yet their eye for pleasure is essentially the same.

Schopenhauer nailed it down as metaphysics. Only pain is positive; satisfaction and pleasure are negative. The pleasure we feel isn’t a plus that exists in its own right — it’s just the spot where pain was removed. There has to be hunger (pain) for there to be fullness (pleasure); without lack, there’s no joy of filling.

Epicurus’s definition that “pleasure is the absence of pain” says exactly the same thing. Both men saw happiness not as stacking up pluses but as returning a minus to zero.

Pleasure isn’t a bank balance — it’s the relief of the moment you clear a debt. Pay off the debt (the desire) and you feel briefly unburdened, but it doesn’t carry over as a surplus. So both philosophies point the same way. Don’t go hunting new pleasures; the better deal is to take on less debt in the first place. The conclusion shrink your desires flows out of both alike.

Up to here, they agree. The real fork comes next. Schopenhauer says: so switch the will off. Step out of it for a while through aesthetic contemplation, soften it through compassion, and finally extinguish the will itself through asceticism. Salvation from life is his answer. Epicurus says: so tame the will. Shrink your desires and live quietly, but pleasantly, in your garden. That’s his answer.

One looks for an exit; the other stays in the garden. So can you accept Schopenhauer’s dark diagnosis and still arrive at Epicurus’s bright conclusion? There’s exactly one knot where that becomes possible.

The knot: boredom and calm are the same place

Look again at what Schopenhauer’s boredom actually is. Once a desire is filled, the will loses anything to cling to. That empty, halted will is boredom.

But Epicurus’s ataraxia, examined closely, is the same halt. A state where desire has gone quiet, where craving has emptied out.

Of course the two reach it by different routes. Schopenhauer’s boredom arrives right after you’ve gotten what you wanted; Epicurus’s calm is reached in advance, by shrinking your desires from the start. The starting points are opposite. But wherever the route began, the state you land in is the same: a halt, with nothing for the mind to turn toward in this moment. So the difference between boredom and calm isn’t what occupies that empty spot. Objectively, both are equally empty. The difference comes down to one thing only: how you read the emptiness.

Schopenhauer couldn’t bear that empty spot and felt it as the pain called boredom; Epicurus savored the same empty spot as the peace of all pain gone. Two men, the same place, experienced in exactly opposite ways.

Picture an empty Sunday afternoon: work all done, nothing on the calendar. For one person that blank is unbearably bare, so they keep reaching for the phone, hunting fresh stimulation. That’s boredom. For another, the same blank is something to stretch out and enjoy — I don’t have to do anything. That’s calm. Same time, same situation; only the ability to handle the blank is different.

So boredom is calm you don’t know how to savor, and calm is boredom you’ve accepted. Schopenhauer’s diagnosis — that boredom is the necessary underside of fulfillment — is right. It’s just that the boredom doesn’t have to be pain. Boredom isn’t an enemy to wipe out; it’s closer to a sign of immaturity, of not yet having learned how to savor. A lesson to graduate from, not a sentence you can’t escape.

So don’t switch the will off — tame it

Out of this knot comes an attitude. Keep Schopenhauer’s metaphysics intact, but swap out only the conclusion he drew (switch the will off) for Epicurus’s. The will isn’t something you can erase; it’s the raw material of your own self. Instead of fighting to switch it off, you tame it. There are two methods.

First, narrow the pendulum’s swing. The swinging itself is the will’s nature, so you can’t stop it. But the amplitude is yours to set. Big desires breed big lack and big boredom; small ones circle in a shallow arc. Epicurus’s classification of desires is precisely this amplitude dial. Build the foundation of your happiness on the natural and necessary, and the pendulum won’t gouge deep. This isn’t to throw away all great ambition. It’s to keep at least the floor that can’t be allowed to collapse on a small, shallow loop.

Second, savor the empty stretch. Train yourself, when the pendulum halts at the far end of fulfillment, not to flee that moment of boredom but to move it over into calm. Instead of papering over the boredom with new stimulation, practice rereading the emptiness as right now nothing is lacking.

The best hours are outside the pendulum

Left there, this is a somewhat passive philosophy. Shrink your desires, endure the empty spot. It uses only half of Schopenhauer’s rich idea of the will. There’s room to take one more step.

Schopenhauer himself left one active passage out of the will: aesthetic contemplation, music above all. Lose yourself deeply in something and the craving “I” briefly vanishes, leaving only the object. It’s a third state, neither lack nor boredom. In today’s language we call it flow.

But why is this “outside the pendulum”? Both lack and boredom arise, in the end, because I’m apart from the object. Either chasing it (lack) or having lost it (boredom). The pendulum swings left and right because there’s always a distance between me and the object. Flow is the moment that distance goes to zero. When you’re absorbed in making something, the gap between “me” and “what I’m doing” disappears. With no distance to push or pull across, the very string the bob hangs from comes loose. It goes to neither end. You’ve slipped out of the pendulum’s motion for a while.

State	The will’s shape	How it feels
Lack	will chasing the object	pain
Boredom	will that lost the object	emptiness
Flow	will fused with the object	outside the pendulum

Making something, concentrating deeply, the labor or play you get lost in. This is a third road. It pulls the will out of the endless hunt and ties it to a small, sustainable loop.

Epicurus’s garden was exactly such a device. Friends, a vegetable patch, conversation — activities that don’t end but circle on, quietly. Not a desire you fill once and finish with, but a loop that keeps turning as long as you tend it. That he warned against fame and wealth while spending his whole life founding a school, writing, and raising students is no contradiction. He pulled his feet out of the leaking jar, but into the bowl whose bottom he could see, he poured everything.

The weak link in this synthesis

Better not to hide the weakest link: whether moving boredom over into calm is really possible at all.

Schopenhauer would fire back like this. That very capacity to convert is just another disguise of the will, and however calm you seem for a moment, the will soon finds a new object and starts shoving the pendulum again. Isn’t even the resolve to savor the empty spot just one more desire — the desire to savor?

It’s a heavy objection, and it doesn’t get cleanly refuted. Epicurus has only one answer to offer. Calm isn’t something you’re born with — it’s a discipline. A muscle grown through insight and habit. At first the empty Sunday afternoon is hard to bear, but repeat the practice of reading that blank as calm and it grows less bare over time. It’s the kind of claim you confirm by living it out, more than a proven proposition.

So this synthesis is less a settled conclusion than a bet worth placing. It’s the firmest optimism available only to someone who has taken the dark premises head-on — that the will is real, and that boredom is the underside of fulfillment. Not an optimism that doesn’t know emptiness, but one that has passed through it, which is why it doesn’t snap so easily.

Tending a garden on the edge of a cliff

Schopenhauer and Epicurus stood before the same cliff. The cliff where desire has no end and fulfillment cools at once into boredom. Schopenhauer said: so leave this cliff entirely. Pull your feet out of the land of desire — salvation from life. Borrow from Epicurus and another answer becomes possible. Instead of leaving, tend a garden on the edge of that cliff.

The will can’t be switched off, so you tame it. Lack you manage by narrowing the swing, boredom you savor as calm, and in between, the best hours are spent in flow, outside the pendulum. You can grant the metaphysics of pessimism all the way down and still find that the conclusion need not be pessimistic. A bright attitude built on top of a dark diagnosis may outlast one that is simply bright and knows nothing.

— tomte