Our want for security hurts us in the long term
In the midst of the nineteenth century, the German thinker Arthur Schopenhauer was attempting to unravel a riddle: Why do individuals search relationships once they result in a lot ache?
In response to this troubling phenomenon, he wrote a parable generally known as “The Hedgehog’s Dilemma.”
Right here is the way it begins:
One chilly winter’s day, quite a lot of hedgehogs huddled collectively fairly intently so as by means of their mutual heat to stop themselves from being frozen. However they quickly felt the impact of their quills on each other, which made them once more transfer aside. Now when the necessity for heat as soon as extra introduced them collectively, the disadvantage of the quills was repeated in order that they have been tossed between two evils, till that they had found the right distance from which they might greatest tolerate each other.
Schopenhauer attracts a parallel between these fictitious hedgehogs and people in actual life.
Simply because the hedgehogs can’t get too shut to one another or they’ll get damage, so too should people preserve their distance from each other — even on the expense of typically feeling chilly and lonely. This, says Schopenhauer, is the trade-off we should make if we’re to get together with different individuals.
