Futility and Cosmic Indifference

Schopenhauer, the famous philosopher, worked for two years in an office. He hated it.

It was not until the death of his conventionalist father and the blessing of his arty mother that young Schopenhauer was able to escape, return education, and to pursue his desired life of letters.

The journalist Mason Currey writes that Schopenhauer

did not forget his two-plus years working in an office; to the contrary, the sense of futility and cosmic indifference that he experienced there became the kernel of all his future work.

and:

How you feel about Schopenhauer’s story probably depends on how you feel about your own lot in life. On the one hand, how delightful that this budding genius escaped a lifetime of uninspired drudgery and that his brief experience of office life inspired an entire philosophy! On the other hand, how fucking depressing, because think of the many potential Schopenhauers who are never rescued from their day jobs, who spend their lives feeling in their bones that they’re destined for something greater but lack the time and resources to figure out what that might be.

Personally, I think of both of those things.

These Mason Currey quotes come from from his new book, Making Art and Making a Living, which is very good indeed. I’ll have more to say about it somewhere soon.

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Escape with the best of them by reading New Escapologist Issue 19.