The surprising positivity of pessimism

Questioning the meaning of life and finding none can seem like a vicious and dark spiral but the philosophy of pessimism doesn’t have to be so, well, pessimistic, writes M M Owen

The big question, pessimists say, is how can we justify the heartache and the thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to? (Getty/iStock)

The first season of HBO’s True Detective stars Matthew McConaughey as a lithe, taciturn detective named Rust Cohle. In the series premiere, Cohle is asked by his partner (played by Woody Harrelson) what he believes. “I think human consciousness is a tragic misstep in human evolution,” Cohle replies. Selfhood is an inescapable illusion, and human existence is fundamentally “a raw deal”. “In philosophical terms,” Cohle explains, “I’m what’s called a pessimist.”

McConaughey’s character represents a rare appearance in mainstream culture for a nocturnal school of philosophy that usually stays hidden. In common parlance, pessimism refers to a vague glumness, a general failure to look on the bright side. But in the history of human thought, pessimism – from the Latin for “worst” – means something denser, deeper and darker.

Whatever it is you believe about life, you probably believe it is basically OK. Accompanied by some struggles and some privations, but on the whole a good gig. Perhaps you never asked for it, but you’re okay with having it. Certainly it’s improvable. You’re aware the curtain will eventually come down, but you generally put that out of your mind. If pressed, you would answer yes, life is, as they say, a gift; yes, in my final hour, it will have been worth it, all the huffing and puffing.

Philosophical pessimists aren’t so sure. For millennia, a loose but discernible group of thinkers have entertained the idea that human existence is marked by flaws beyond repair. Life, concluded modern pessimism’s godfather, Arthur Schopenhauer, “is a business that does not cover its costs”.

On what grounds have people developed such a mirthless view? And what might be gained by countenancing their ideas?

“Consciousness is a disease.” So wrote Miguel de Unamuno, a Spanish author of the early 20th century. Pessimism is a slippery tradition; few thinkers have explicitly embraced the label, and it comes in a variety of styles. But all forms of pessimism start from the premise that the human mind is unique, and unique in ways that cause us to suffer. It is common, in the pessimistic tradition, to contrast the cognition of Homo sapiens with the cognition of simpler species. Animals, many pessimists observe, are blessed with a sort of involuntary mindfulness. But humans, as the Romanian philosopher Emil Cioran put it, have “fallen into time”.

To fall into time is to become aware of time. This awareness, in the pessimist account, is a curse. Unlike other species, a dark lightbulb has winked on in our skulls, and suddenly we see it: a past without us, a future without us. Arriving at this awareness marks our exile from childhood. As adults, whether or not people talk about it, we all see what we are: a brief disturbance in a cosmos overwhelmingly absent of the thing we call life.

German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer, the father of modern pessimism (Getty)

In the Iliad, Homer describes “the lives of mortal men” as “like the generations of leaves”, scattering and regathering, again and again, for eternity. This cosmic irrelevance, pessimists argue, presents a stunning challenge to any affirmative worldview. Obsidian, on the outer rim of all our thinking, it lingers: the background hum of it is all for naught; the pinched-stomach knowledge that, as Schopenhauer put it, “everything becomes nothingness in our hands”.

Our ephemerality is pessimism’s grounding concern. Unlike other creatures, we are burdened with the knowledge that, in Marcus Aurelius’s phrase, we are “yesterday a blob of semen; tomorrow embalming fluid”. Every other school of philosophy, in the pessimist account, meets this fact with all the courage of an ostrich. And yet, the pessimists say, it is the big question, really the only question: against this cosmic blankness, how can we justify, how can we make worth a damn, the heartache and the thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to?

Perhaps our fall into time wouldn’t be such an issue were our conscious lives defined by unbridled bliss, or at least the mindless repose of a labrador. But, pessimists concur, consciousness has condemned us in more moment-to-moment ways. Alongside our awareness of cosmic time, we swim in the other biological novelty that is language. This strange brew produces the oddity that is the self. I am Matthew; you are someone else. Our selves are at bottom shimmering illusions, but they are illusions that are impossible to vanquish. And they drive us on, these inner, never-ending circus halls of unfilled yearning.

In short, the pessimist account of cognition claims that we are built for unhappiness. Pessimists perceive, as the scholar Joshua Foa Dienstag describes it, “a persistent mismatch between human purposes and the means available to achieve them; between our desire for happiness and our capacity to encounter or sustain it.” The cold reality, pessimists argue, is that a far greater portion of conscious life involves feeling dissatisfied than feeling happy. We crave constantly, and are content rarely. “We are always preparing to be happy,” wrote Blaise Pascal, but never quite arriving. Consciousness is built atop a constant and unyielding tension between what Schopenhauer called Representation (our desires and hopes) and Will (the grinding, onward, indifferent march of blank matter and blank time).

The cold reality, pessimists argue, is that a far greater portion of conscious life involves feeling dissatisfied than feeling happy

Harried by time, alone with our nonstop thoughts, we flounder. We know we don’t have forever, but we can’t fill the hours in a way that grants real satisfaction. In place of peace, compassion, serenity, our mind nudges us every moment towards fear, envy, contempt. We see this everywhere: politics, history, the things you eavesdrop on strangers gossiping about, the things that garner clicks.

Tauntingly of all, pleasure is fleeting. Its objects evaporate almost as soon as they are grasped. A cheeseburger is great, but it is gone in minutes. Sex is great, but after the brief sweet oblivion, you are back in the room. Chasing, chasing. Satisfying desires grants a momentary cessation of lack, and then the desire is reborn with a renewed ferocity. The hedonic treadmill will always find ways to keep spinning, in more elaborate and demanding ways. Lust shackles us worst of all (Sigmund Freud, who strove to convert “hysterical misery into common unhappiness”, was a pessimist).

Because unease is constant and satisfaction fleeting, pessimists argue that the abiding condition of life is unsatisfied desire, which manifests itself mainly as boredom – another unique inheritance of the human species. Boredom, Schopanhauer argues, “is nothing other than the sensations of the emptiness of existence”. It can only be staved off if the senses are drowned, and only then for a while. We see this, and yet the drives are too much. To stay still is to hear the void. As Pascal wrote, “the only thing that consoles our miserable state is being distracted”. Netflix to drown out the void. Porn to drown out the void. Deliveroo to down out the void. Even 10 minutes of waking stillness so painful that people cannot bear it.

If you are familiar with Buddhism, then this will sound very familiar to you. Often regarded as pessimistic, Buddhism begins with the first noble truth of duḥkha, the fundamental suffering or unsatisfactoriness of life. Duḥkha is born of the mind, and its untamed relationship to reality. Thwarting duḥkha is possible, but it requires serious commitment and a psychic discipline that comes naturally to very few.

Of course, one might dissent from the pessimist account of mind: I am happy most of the time, my desires are perfectly satisfied, I look forward to myself and everyone I love turning to dust. Pessimists would respond that the evidence of the world belies the reality: constant striving, permanent irritation, a pervasive hatred of ageing, and plenty more evidence of 7 billion minds being ill at ease.

Our cosmic ephemerality; our booby-trapped brains. This one-two punch, pessimism says, amounts to a philosophical Everest. Scaling it may be impossible; at minimum, it is a serious challenge. This is why, as Albert Camus famously said, “there is only one really serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide”. Faced with the way the cosmic deck is stacked, pessimists say it is reasonable to ask why living is better than not living.

The overall picture, for many pessimists, is a sort of cruel joke concocted by a sadistic cosmos. Material progress is all well and good – Schopenhauer enjoyed haute cuisine; Camus took antibiotics for his tuberculosis – but this material advancement contrasts with an absence of progress in the phenomenology of being human. Consciousness, pessimists say, remains stolidly consistent. Caveman or 21st century California billionaire: both bone clocks and they know it. Desire infinite, satisfaction momentary. Worlds might change, but the brain doesn’t. “For 20 centuries,” says a character in Camus’ The Rebel, “the sum total of evil has not diminished in the world. No paradise, whether divine or revolutionary, has been realised.”

The first thing that many pessimist philosophers note is how pervasive pessimism is in all cultures

Are you repelled? Suspicious of why any essayist or any publication would want to dwell on such gloom? We have a sort of psychic immune system that lurches into action when it encounters pessimist philosophy. Stop wallowing! Chin up! (The evolutionary benefit of such a system is easily imagined.) Confronted by such dolefulness, we rush to ask: how could this kind of thing possibly yield positive results? Instinctively, we downgrade pessimism from serious thought to a mood. It is ungrateful, a luxury of the idle. It is the indulgent moping of a certain type of teenager, or perhaps just straightforward psychopathology. In 1877, when pessimism first reached prominence as a branch of western philosophy, the prominent British psychologist James Sully declared it an illness.

It is understandable that pessimistic ideas make us wary. Someone who is clinically melancholy will indeed sound like a pessimist; we love people, we want to rescue them, we want to expel black thoughts. Even if the worry isn’t this acute, people are prone to treating ideas as mental ether; wander through them and they might cling to you. Pessimistic ideas are the ultimate buzzkill, a sort of species-level hereticism. True Detective is an anomaly because we like our philosophies to be rousing, warming, full of promise of a better tomorrow. His outlook, Cohle admits, makes him “bad at parties”.

However, pessimism is not so easily dismissed. For one, it is not nearly as niche or as esoteric as philosophy textbooks would suggest. As the pessimism scholar Eugene Thacker told me, “the first thing that many pessimist philosophers note is how pervasive pessimism is in all cultures. The second thing they note is how it always seems to lurk in the shadows.”

Pessimism is very old, and it is everywhere. We have relics of pessimistic thinking from ancient Mesopotamia, and from the Aztec culture, which the french anthropologist Jacques Soustelle adjudged to be “soaked in pessimism” (the Aztec solution was “a fiery zeal for the sacred war”; one option, perhaps). Pessimism colours a great deal of Greek philosophy, particularly the pre-Socratics and the Stoics. Sweeping as it may sound, every major religious tradition can reasonably be regarded as pessimistic. In every known theology, life is no cakewalk. In most religions, this life is viewed as so vexing that it can only be justified by a great beyond. “Utterly meaningless! Everything is meaningless,” declares the king in Jerusalem, in the Book of Ecclesiastes.

Pessimism is also perfectly scientific. In fact, though it generally goes unmentioned by science’s ever-perky popularisers, modern science might be the most pessimistic worldview a human culture has ever devised. Prehistoric cultures universally believed in an enchanted cosmos. Religious pessimists can at least lean on a next incarnation or a next life.  But the scientific picture of things offers no such trapdoors. It is as blank and as anti-human as any of pessimism’s most despairing texts. The universe, as Richard Dawkins explains, contains “nothing but blind, pitiless indifference” and is “overwhelmingly hostile”.  There is no numinous spark. Just neurons zapping in the skulls of primates. The smell of cut pineapple, the Adagio in G minor, the way she touches her bottom lip when you make her laugh – all of it inert matter; “the outcome,” as Bertrand Russell says, “of accidental collocations of atoms.” Escaping religious pessimism merely lands us in the next shadowy chamber. Modern science leaves us no choice, as Russell goes on to write, but to construct a worldview “on the firm foundation of unyielding despair”.

And so: though it has hidden in the shadows for fear of being bad at parties, pessimism runs like a thin, bleak strand through the history of human thought. East, west; God, no God. Its two monolithic questions – How can any of this possibly mean anything? How can I stop it all feeling like ashes in my month, happiness as slippery as soap? – are always there. Pessimism darkens the work of many fine fiction authors, from Joseph Conrad and Samuel Beckett to Cormac McCarthy and Michel Houellebecq. Indeed, we have a genre whose highest products are all dedicated to pessimism: horror. Probably the most bruising work of modern pessimism – and the inspiration for the character of Cohle in True Detective – is The Conspiracy Against the Human Race, written by Thomas Ligotti, one of America’s leading horror authors.

Indeed, once you start looking for the bleakest conception of things, you find it everywhere. Alexander Hamilton has been mythologised into a rousing story of immigrant gumption, but according to his biographer, “an ineradicable pessimism about human nature … infused all his writing”.

Time for some good news: some of the most prominent pessimists have loved living. Many of them haven’t – but many of them have. In the history of pessimism, whether spiritualised or secular, there is a fairly clear line between two forms of response: resignation, and defiance.

Pessimism’s canon cannot be sugarcoated: there are those who have ruminated for years, and concluded that the game is unwinnable, and that retreat is the wisest option. There is very real fatalism in the pessimist tradition. Many of the texts sag with a deep weariness that can only rouse itself to jaded aphorism. Other than contemplating great painting, Schopenhauer saw no way out. Aesthetic experience can allow us to jump free of ourselves for a little while, he said, but otherwise, all we can do is be still. Try (probably fail) to dampen desire. The Stoics (often regarded as pessimists) recommended forms of withdrawal, in life and in the mind. In the work of Cioran, Ligotti and other pessimists, there is simply no way out of the bind. The only way to avoid admitting defeat is to delude yourself.

By contrast, there are the pessimists who choose defiance. These thinkers share the basic picture of reality with their resigned counterparts – but their response is the opposite. The most famous of the defiant pessimists is Friedrich Nietzsche. Despite a lifetime of abysmal physical health, Nietzsche was desperate to overcome the temptations of pessimism. We have killed God, he said, and an honest post-mortem must tip one toward nihilism. But we must reject nihilism. In its place, Nietzsche advocated a “Dionysian pessimism”. We must accept that the universe offers no consolation, he said. But with sufficient self-confidence – self-confidence befitting a god of wine and ecstasy – we can regard this blankness as liberating, endlessly ripe for invention. “It is a measure of the degree of strength of will,” he wrote, “to what extent one can do without meaning in things, to what extent one can endure to live in a meaningless world because one organises a small portion of it oneself.”

Pouring oneself into the creation of beauty, of novelty, perhaps even of love, becomes all the more heroic precisely because it will one day go to the wind

For Nietzsche, the pinnacle of this organisation was art (he adored Fyodor Dostoevsky). One’s own life, he said, can be treated as a work of art. Embracing an infinite openness, we might strive to pull light out of the void for ourselves, without the aid of non-human forces. Rejecting transcendent meaning, we might “give the earth a meaning, a human meaning”. If the cosmos gives us a blank, Nietzsche said, then we can be a sort of Prometheus; we can climb a deserted Olympus, and steal the flame of creation for ourselves.

A similar stance was taken by Albert Camus. Camus viewed the human condition as fundamentally “absurd”, comparing our existence to that of Sisyphus, who in Greek myth was condemned by Zeus to roll a boulder up a hill, only to watch it roll back down, over and over, forever. Like Nietzsche, Camus admitted that there was no escaping our sentence, no laying down the boulder. But Camus concurred with Nietzsche: with the right psychological stance we might “imagine Sisyphus happy”. “The struggle toward the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart,” said Camus, if we approach it right. For Camus, creation was most powerful where it brought reality into a single bright point: in the theatre, and on the soccer pitch.

The position of the defiant pessimists is hard to gloss. Like pessimism itself, it is one part raw feeling; an inner steel, a fundamental “saying yes”, as Nietzsche put it. It is disposition, not empiricism. Life-affirming is best preserved in the original writings, at full, felt length. But all of it takes this view: yes, we are all born to suffering; yes, we’ll all be in the ground soon enough. But life is fundamentally mysterious, rich and available. Dienstag told me that “futurity” is the affirmative pessimists’ core value. Giacomo Leopardi, another pessimist who strained for defiance, declared that vivid striving could itself amount to a form of meaning. “Life must be vital,” he said; enough vitality, and it is inherently better than death. If you can laugh, all the better. The defiant pessimists have historically been fans of literature’s greatest quester, Don Quixote.

In Tibetan Buddhism, there is a tradition involving sand mandalas. Vast, gorgeous, technicolor mandalas are conjured over hundreds of hours using millions of sand grains. Then, not long after the mandala is finished, it is destroyed. The whole ceremony is a tribute to, and acceptance of, the ephemerality of the material realm. To the life-affirming pessimists, life itself can be seen as a series of sand mandalas. Pouring oneself into the creation of beauty, of novelty, perhaps even of love, becomes all the more heroic precisely because it will one day go to the wind. This claim is hard to grasp rationally: the fragility is the sublimity. But this is the dance that the life-affirming pessimists attempt. The struggle is noble. We wouldn’t want it easy. The unfolding itself can be regarded as an intoxication, and the creative powers of consciousness can be our earthly redemption.

It feels rather uncouth – perhaps even mean – to recommend that anyone check out books with titles like The Trouble With Being Born and Better Never to Have Been. No one can be blamed for wanting to swerve the pessimist tradition altogether. The sun is shining, dinner must be cooked, our loved ones need attention, suicide is unthinkable – so why bother? Why indeed. Every moment you might spend reading Schopenhauer’s grim diagnoses is a moment you could be spending on something else. If you can leave it alone, then perhaps leave it alone.

But if you are one of those souls who are compelled to make a feast of questioning – whose enquiries are by nature incessant, maximalist, thorough – then you must eventually arrive at pessimism. Like athletes or armies, philosophies prove their strength by doing battle with their sternest possible foes. And unlike gentler forms of philosophy, pessimism starts from zero. Whatever your outlook, if you want to believe the game is worth the candle, then what Thacker calls “the night-side of thought” must be countenanced.

“Any possible human redemption,” said David Foster Wallace, “requires us to first face what’s dreadful, what we want to deny.” Pessimism, in its various costumes, offers the most dreadful picture of where we find ourselves. When I first encountered this picture, in the form of Camus’s The Myth of Sisyphus, it was like a cold breeze through a clammy schoolroom. What had been sold to me as the full spectrums of human thought – fascism or anarchism; communism or libertarianism; theocracy or scientism – all hid a great unity: optimism. Life was a series of repairs away from being dandy. Convert or vanquish those with the wrong ideas and all will be well. I had suspected the job might be tougher than this. Here, finally, was the bigger story. Exactly, I thought. We’re all doomed. Everyone spends all day trying to stay sane. Why is no one talking about this?

When I asked Thacker what positives he’s taken from the pessimist tradition, he said: “I’ve always been drawn to those thinkers who are willing to shore up the limitations of human thought, and expose the presumptuousness of our human-centric ways of thinking. A humility is produced from this. There’s a certain mix of tranquility and terror that results.”

Everyone’s alchemy is different. In my case, pessimism has pushed me to fight against the autopilot of consciousness. That way lies trouble. I must do better than my instinctive disposition; I must not let my thoughts drag my conduct like the changing winds. Evolution, it seems, has conditioned our minds for strife. The pessimists were systematising this conditioning long before Darwin. If you want to know where the challenge of conscious living is at its thorniest, where your brain will most quickly seduce and sabotage you if you let it, then pessimism can help.

The pessimists’ focus on our ephemerality can also push you to be your own memento mori. When my mother phones, I always hover on ignoring it. But then I remember she will one day be gone, and I make a treasure of the sound of her voice. I remind myself that my senses will decay; I enjoy the taste of hot oolong, the sight of high tree branches in the breeze while I still can. Laughter I try to ride like a wave; I am just fine at parties.

I can enjoy pessimism’s iciest waters like a stiff drink, but it holds fast: I adore the world and I loathe that it is always leaving me. “Pessimism is life-affirming,” Dienstag told me, “in the sense that it means every event in the world has its own significance, not as part of some larger historical pattern, but just on its own terms.” He’s right. Pessimism forces you to give shape to this significance. It has forced me to accept that my adoration of the world is not rational; that meaning itself is not rational. I have accepted, as Dostoevsky’s Ivan Karamazov says, that much of life is best lived “not with your mind, not with logic, but with your insides, your guts”.

Life is full of potential consolations. Perhaps some of where I and others have arrived rings true. Or perhaps your consolation lies elsewhere: in an unbroken faith in the heavens; in the weirder corners of physics; or in experiences with psychedelics, glimpses of a different rollercoaster altogether. But if you are trying to build it – a way through, a code that isn’t bloodless – then resistance offers strength. Pessimism can help make your affirmation unbreakable. Fear in a handful of nothing; face down that and you can face down all of it.