Congratulations. You Got Everything You Wanted. How's That Going?

At some point in the last decade, humanity solved entertainment.

This is not a small achievement. For most of human history, boredom was a genuine threat. People sat in rooms with nothing happening. They stared at walls. They went to bed at eight because there was simply nothing else to do, and they lay there in the dark thinking about their lives, which was apparently so unpleasant that the entire arc of human civilisation can be partially understood as a long, expensive attempt to avoid it.

We cracked it. You now have access to more films, television, music, podcasts, games, articles, videos, and algorithmically generated content than you could consume in several consecutive lifetimes. The wall-staring problem is over. You can be stimulated every waking moment from the age of two until you die, and a significant portion of the population is treating this as a lifestyle goal rather than a warning sign.

And yet, if you will permit me to observe the obvious, people seem deeply unhappy. Restless in a way that predates whatever news cycle is currently making everyone anxious. Unable to sit with silence for the length of a television advertisement. Scrolling not because there is something they want to find but because stopping feels like a small confrontation with something they would rather not confront.

A 19th century German philosopher who was personally miserable, professionally overlooked, and almost pathologically certain that existence was suffering saw all of this coming with the serene accuracy of someone who had thought the problem through to the bottom.

Arthur Schopenhauer, Who Was Not a Fun Person to Have Dinner With

Arthur Schopenhauer published his major work in 1818 and was essentially ignored, which did not improve his disposition. He was contemptuous of Hegel, contemptuous of academic philosophy, contemptuous of most people, and in possession of a prose style so lucid and cutting that reading him feels like being mildly insulted by someone too intelligent to bother being rude about it.

His central claim was that underlying all human experience is something he called the Will, which he did not mean in the ordinary sense of willpower or decision-making. He meant a blind, purposeless, insatiable drive that pushes every living thing toward existence and continuation and the satisfaction of desire without any particular reason for doing so and without any final destination in mind. The Will does not want anything specific. It just wants. Perpetually. Without satisfaction.

Human beings, being conscious, experience this as desire. You want things. You pursue them. The pursuit is uncomfortable, tinged with anxiety, coloured by the awareness of everything you do not yet have. Then you get the thing. And for a brief moment, the wanting quiets.

Then it starts again.

Schopenhauer described human life as a pendulum swinging between suffering and boredom. Suffering is what you feel when desire is unsatisfied. Boredom is what you feel when it is. The pendulum swings, and neither end is comfortable, and there is no position in the middle where you get to rest, because the middle is just the moment of transition between one discomfort and the next.

He was not describing a pathology. He was describing Tuesday.

What Netflix Actually Sold You

The entertainment industry of the 21st century built the most sophisticated desire-satisfaction machine in human history. It gave you the ability to want something and have it immediately. A film, a show, a song, a specific piece of content you read about somewhere and went looking for at eleven at night. The gap between desire and satisfaction, which used to be a trip to the video rental shop and a genuine possibility of disappointment, collapsed to essentially zero.

This should have produced extraordinary contentment.

What it actually produced was a new and specific form of restlessness that has its own vocabulary now. Doom-scrolling. Binge-watching. The thing where you spend forty-five minutes choosing something to watch and feel vaguely dissatisfied before you have even started watching it, then watch three episodes of a show you are not sure you are enjoying, then go to bed feeling neither rested nor entertained but also unable to identify the point at which you could have stopped.

Schopenhauer would clock this immediately. The entertainment machine did not defeat the pendulum. It sped it up. When the gap between desire and satisfaction collapses, what you actually remove is the satisfaction, because satisfaction is not the moment you get the thing. It is the moment the wanting quiets, and the wanting only quiets when it has had a chance to actually want, to build, to be frustrated long enough that the resolution means something.

Instant gratification is, in Schopenhauerian terms, a slightly cruel joke. You are feeding the Will so efficiently that it never gets the chance to be satisfied. It just keeps wanting, faster and faster, which is why a person can spend four hours consuming content and feel, at the end of it, not full but somehow hungrier than before.

The Specific Misery of Having Good Taste

There is a particular version of this problem that affects people who consider themselves discerning, which is most people who would pick up an article like this one.

The discerning consumer has high standards. They do not watch just anything. They have a list, carefully curated, of things they intend to engage with seriously. They are behind on several prestige dramas. There are films from the last two years they have been meaning to get to. There are books on their nightstand doing the patient work of being unread.

The standards make the pendulum worse, not better. Because now the wanting is also attached to self-image. You do not just want entertainment; you want to be the kind of person who engages with the right entertainment in the right way. The Will has annexed your taste, which was supposed to be the refined part of you that rose above mere appetites, and turned it into another appetite.

This is why the forty-five minute choosing experience feels so specifically defeating. You are not just trying to find something good. You are trying to find something good enough that the watching of it justifies the watching of it, produces the right kind of person on the other side, delivers not just pleasure but the sense of having used the evening well. This is an enormous amount of pressure to put on a television programme, and television programmes, being television programmes, consistently fail to meet it.

Schopenhauer's advice, delivered from the 1800s with characteristic warmth, was essentially that the only escape from the pendulum is to stop identifying with the Will. To cultivate a kind of contemplative distance from desire rather than constantly chasing its satisfaction. He admired art, ironically, as one of the few activities in which the Will went quiet, in which a person could be absorbed in something beyond their own wanting for a genuine moment.

He would be fascinated and devastated to learn that we turned art into a content library and then felt restless in front of it.

A Brief Word on the People Who Proudly Don't Watch Television

They are also on the pendulum. They have simply located their version of it in productivity, or in outdoor activities, or in the performance of not-watching-television, which is its own desire structure with its own dissatisfactions and its own identity investment.

The pendulum is not a technology problem. Schopenhauer was writing before television, before radio, before recorded music. He was describing something he observed in human beings living relatively simple lives in a world with far less stimulation than ours, and finding the pendulum in operation anyway. The entertainment economy did not create the mechanism. It just gave it a particularly vivid contemporary expression.

The smug non-consumer has escaped Netflix and landed in Goodreads, where they track their reading like metrics and feel vaguely competitive about page counts and experience a low-grade anxiety when they fall behind their yearly target, which is a self-imposed target for a leisure activity, which Schopenhauer would find completely on-brand for the species.

The Silence Question

Here is the thing that the whole structure of modern life is quietly organised around avoiding.

If you sit in a room with no phone, no screen, no podcast, no input of any kind, and you simply sit there, something happens within a fairly short period of time. Somewhere between two and seven minutes, depending on your personal relationship with stillness, the silence starts to produce something. Not peace, necessarily. More like the things you have been not-thinking-about arriving in something like a queue.

This is not a spiritual experience. This is just what happens when the Will is not being fed and the normal background noise of wanting and getting quiets down long enough for the actual contents of your experience to become visible.

Most people find this deeply unpleasant in the short term. The entertainment economy has correctly identified this and built an entire infrastructure around making it unnecessary. You never have to sit in the queue. There is always something to open. The thing you are feeling right now, whatever it is, can always be deferred to after the next episode.

Schopenhauer would not be surprised that this makes people unhappy. He would be surprised that it surprises anyone.

His argument was never that desire is wrong or that pleasure is bad or that you should live a joyless life of monastic contemplation, though he personally leaned hard in that direction and seemed to find it only partially satisfying, which arguably proves his own point. His argument was that a life organised around the constant satisfaction of desire will not, structurally cannot, produce the contentment it promises, because the mechanism runs on dissatisfaction and satisfaction is only ever a moment between two new wants.

The question worth sitting with, in the silence that opens up when you put the phone down, is not "what do I want to watch next." It is something more fundamental and considerably less comfortable, which is probably why the phone is so useful and why the screen is always right there.

Schopenhauer thought most people would choose the screen. He thought this with the weary certainty of a man who had watched humanity operate for a long time and expected very little from it in terms of self-knowledge.

He was, on balance, more right than anyone would like.