As we are getting older, there is a growing split between who we are and who we want be. We use ideologies, unrepentant capitalism and half-truths to bridge it. This split vanishes with the superficial coat of paint that is daily life. In the cold of night,  it rears its ugly head. Like Camus’s protagonist in The Stranger, that absurd reality of the truth will shake us to our very being.

In Schopenhauer’s parable, Hedgehog’s Dilemma, we find ourselves with a group of hedgehogs on a cold winter night. In their attempt to get warm, they try to huddle together. In doing so, prick each other. Moving away from each other they are stuck shivering in the cold, alone. So, they devise the perfect distance that they can endure together.

Freud took this parable to talk about boundaries, isolation and intimacy in relationships. For me, this gets to the core of the split in modern nature. The perils of staying on the path of understanding. Marooned between artistic needs and a deep desire for acceptance and being seen. Trying to hold on to hope and despair simultaneously in our minds. Are we forever stuck in this tango of being right and being happy? Of never being satisfied? Of asserting our T-ruth and F-reedom in everything we do.

I left out this part of the parable earlier,

“Yet whoever has a great deal of internal warmth of his own will prefer to keep away from society in order to avoid giving or receiving trouble or annoyance.”

I think Schopenhauer’s idea of internal warmth is the way forward. Albeit, not in trying to make myself self-sufficient in order to untie myself from everyone around me. Rather, to let that internal warmth warm up the people closest to me.