Pendulums
“Life swings like a pendulum backward and forward between pain and boredom.” -Arthur Schopenhauer
Schopenhauer believed that life was a pendulum constantly swinging between pain and boredom. While the words “pain and boredom” seem harsh (as I would rather replace those words with hard work and gratification) the sentiment is reasonable. In life we constantly have goals and we must struggle to achieve them (Schopenhauer’s “pain”) and with that achievement comes a brief respite (Schopenhauer’s “boredom”) before finding a new goal and having the cycle begin again. Having come out of university I assumed that I would find the great example of this pendulum. Long had I toiled under the 2AM moon, writing a paper that could have been started two weeks prior. Too many a Sunday had I woken up unable to move after a night of … thrilling debate. Many, many a morning did I down my six shots of espresso to get me through my first lecture and its preceding gym session. I understood the notion of struggle in the academic world and had felt the pendulum on the micro scale. Placing my head on a pillow after an all-nighter, a cheeky pub session after an exam, that final whistle in a water polo match: those were Schopenhauer’s moments of boredom. After four years of experiencing the pendulum at this scale I was ready for the macro version and, as it turned out, I was going to face it in its purest form.
My departure from university coincided with the outbreak of a global pandemic and the rigour of university was replaced with the boredom of a stay at home order. Luckily, or perhaps unluckily, I did not spend long (proportionately) in this post university nadir. Soon the job market came calling and along with it the unique struggles of the real world. Again, both on the micro and macro scale, I was faced with a constant series of goals and the associated pain that came with striving for them. As the cycle held outside of an academic environment, I wondered how people came to find contentment in their lives.
Taking Schopenhauer’s words at face value, contentment would seem to come from one of two places: either people would get used to the pain of not reaching their goal or they would not have any goals to accomplish. However, neither of these answers seem satisfactory. There are two famous stories about Alexander the Great, one from the film Die Hard and one from the writings of Plutarch. In Die Hard Hans Gruber states that “when Alexander saw the breadth of his domain, he wept, for there were no more worlds left to conquer.” Prior to that Plutarch recounted a story where “Alexander wept when he heard Anaxarchus’ discourse about an infinite number of worlds, and when his friends inquired what ailed him, ‘is it not worthy of tears,’ he said, ‘that when the number of worlds is infinite, we have not yet become lords of a single one?’” Alexander felt powerless to create any change in his world. He stood so small in the greater scale of the universe that he did not know what to do. Both quotes tell the story of a man who is lost, without a goal and weeping. Alexander the Great shows us that not having goals would not be something that would give way to idle contentment but rather something sad and difficult. Lacking goals, then, cannot be a way for people to become content.
The other path to contentment would be an acceptance of suffering. The obvious, if slightly out of context, reference here would be to Camus and the line “one must imagine Sisyphus happy” (his reasons being similar but not exactly the same as my own). Sisyphus was condemned to a life of suffering; he was forced to live forever pushing a rock up a mountain and upon reaching the top having the rock roll back down and starting the journey again. This life of endless suffering is meant to be reframed as a life of passive contentment. However, it is of particular importance that Camus chose to use Sisyphus for his example of turning suffering into “happiness.” Sisyphus, by having to push a rock up a mountain, has a goal and even achieves it, finally able to relieve himself of the pain of pushing the rock up the mountain, before having to run his way back down the mountain to start once again. Sisyphus is living with the same pendulum we all are, just framed in a different way. He follows the same cycle of pain and boredom and, much like my experiences at university, this is a cycle that can lead to happiness. However, who we do not imagine happy is Prometheus.
Prometheus, after giving fire to the humans, was tied to a mountain and had his liver eaten by a bird every day. Prometheus faced true suffering, unable to act towards any goal and forced into near constant pain as an eagle regularly ate his insides. No one would stand and say that we must imagine Prometheus happy. Sisyphus may have been able to focus on the goal in front of him, but Prometheus was never able to create a goal, to break free of the mountain. That is why his suffering is true and why by his example we can never truly adjust to accepting constant suffering.
It is by looking at Sisyphus again that we find the answer to human contentment. We often think of pendulums as two-dimensional, swinging back and forth along the x and y axes. However, we live in a three-dimensional world with full access to a z axis and it is when we swing our pendulums in the wrong orientation that we find contentment. Nietzsche believed that man was driven by a singular Will-to-Power or Wille zur Macht. He states
“Life itself is essentially appropriation, injury, overpowering of what is alien and weaker; suppression, hardness, imposition of one’s own forms, incorporation and at least, at its mildest, exploitation.”
Simply put, we all have a drive to create some impact on the world, to change something into our image. Much like Schopenhauer’s pain and boredom, Nietzsche’s words of suppression, imposition and exploitation seem harsh. Even he understands this and writes
“but why should one always use those words in which a slanderous intent has been imprinted for ages? … Exploitation does not belong to a corrupt or imperfect or primitive society: it belongs to the essence of what lives, as a basic organic function; it is a consequence of the will to power, which is after all the will to life.”
There are many ways to make change in the world; for some it may simply be that very physical and ruthless overpowering and for others it may be the mastery of a craft that leads to the implementation of their technique as commonplace. Whatever form our personal Will-to-Power takes is the orientation in which Schopenhauer’s pendulum holds true. However, if after completing a task we set a new goal that does not aid us in our attempts at following that Will-to-Power, we can be trapped in that post-completion boredom. We may swing at an angle, or even perpendicular, to our correct orientation which would dull the feelings of both pain and boredom and ultimately lead us to forget the very thing which kept calling us forward towards new challenges to begin with. We end up moving because we remember that we must complete our tasks but not what those tasks were leading to, and a lack of recognition that we have mis-oriented ourselves is what leads to contentment. A born politician may content himself chopping wood in the forest because he orients his goals towards felling his next tree but if he were to turn his attention back to accruing supporters and creating change in the laws of his state he would never find that contentment.
As the politician forgets his greatest goals and no longer works towards creating a state in his image, he focuses solely on the task in front of him. He finds his reprieve in collecting his lumber and not in making the changes he finds important. Sisyphus was happy because he was completing some goal and knew it could be his only goal. We become complacent when we mis-orient our goals and lose sight of the grander calling that moves us towards those goals that are meaningful.
