Transcript of Why Getting Married is the STUPIDEST Move You Can Make – Arthur Schopenhauer

Picture a man who stripped every illusion bare. Arthur Schopenhau, the philosopher who called existence itself suffering. He had an even harsher view of marriages. To marry is to step into a cell willingly. The door closes and suddenly your rights shrink to shadows while your duties grow like iron chains on your back. Society sells you fairy tales of happily ever after. But Schopenhau saw marriage for what it is, a biological trick, a lifetime contract signed under chemical hypnosis. Look around you. Half of marriages collapse with a 50% divorce rate. The rest limp on in silence. Dead bedrooms, erased identities, quiet desperation behind smiling faces. But here's what nobody tells you about why this happens. According to Schopenhau, the thing we call love isn't some divine blessing, but it's your DNA hijacking your brain to trick you into reproducing. And marriage is the institution that locks you into that biological programming long after the chemicals wear off. This is Schopenhau's clarity about the crulest deception nature ever sold us. Let's start with what you've been sold. Marriage is the ultimate goal. The completion of your life story. The path to lasting happiness and deep fulfillment. Disney movies, romantic comedies, social media, all pushing the same narrative. Find your soulmate, have a wedding, live happily ever after. But Schopenhau saw through this delusion centuries before social media made it worse. What's the reality of modern marriage? 40 to 50% end in divorce. But that's just the ones brave enough to escape. How many more are trapped in Schopenhau's legalized misery? Legalized misery means staying together for financial reasons, social pressure, or fear of starting over. Watch married people at restaurants. How many are actually talking? How many are scrolling their phones, avoiding eye contact, existing in parallel rather than together? Schopenhau predicted this. He understood that marriage forces two fundamentally incompatible things together. The temporary biological drive to pair bond and the permanent legal and social obligation to remain bonded. It's like signing a lifetime gym membership based on how you feel after one good workout. The endorphins fade. The initial motivation disappears, but you're still locked into paying the price day after day, year after year. And there's something even more insidious happening here. Marriage doesn't just fail to deliver happiness. It actively destroys the very qualities that made you attractive in the first place. Your independence becomes codependence. Your mystery becomes familiarity. Your passion becomes routine. But most people don't see this coming because they don't understand what love actually is. Here's Schopenhau's most devastating insight. Falling in love isn't spiritual. It's biological warfare against your rational mind. All love, however, wears the mask of heaven, is rooted in the dirt of sexual impulse alone. This isn't romantic, but it's true. What you call chemistry is literally chemistry. Dopamine, oxytocin, serotonin flooding your brain to override your logical decision-making processes. Your DNA doesn't care about your happiness. It cares about reproduction, and it will hijack your consciousness to achieve that goal. Think about how irrational people become when they're in love. They ignore red flags. They make life-changing decisions based on feelings. They promise forever based on temporary brain states. They commit their entire future to someone they've known for months. Schopenhauer called this the will to live manipulating individuals for the species benefit. Your personal happiness is irrelevant to evolution. You're just a vehicle for genetic transmission. And love is the drug that makes you cooperate with this process willingly. But here's where it gets really cruel. Once the biological purpose is served, once you're locked into the marriage contract, the chemicals that created love naturally diminish. The passion fades. The obsession ends. The magic disappears. Now you're left with the reality. two people who may not actually be compatible, locked into a legal and social arrangement based on a temporary brain state that no longer exists. And this is where Schopenhau's pessimism becomes prophetic. He predicted that most marriages would become exercises in mutual tolerance at best, active suffering at worst. Not because people are evil, but because the foundation, romantic love, is built on quicksand. The person you fell in love with was partially a projection of your brain chemistry. When that chemistry normalizes, you discover you're married to a stranger, someone with different values, different goals, different ways of being, someone you might not even like if you met them today. Which brings us to marriage's most devastating cost. The emptier the mind, the louder the noise it craves. But the sharper the mind, the more it seeks silence. For only in silence does thought sharpen like a blade. Schopenhau wasn't just talking about sound. He was describing the mental chaos that comes from sharing your life with another person. Here's the untold truth about marriage. Every decision becomes a negotiation. Every preference becomes a compromise. Every desire must be filtered through someone else's needs, moods, and opinions. Where to live, how to spend money, what to do on weekends, whether to have children, how to raise them, which friends to see, what shows to watch, when to go to bed, what temperature to keep the house. Your life is no longer your own. Schopenhauer understood that mental freedom requires actual freedom. The philosopher needs solitude to think clearly. The artist needs space to create authentically. The individual needs autonomy to become who they're meant to be. But marriage demands the opposite. Constant consultation. Perpetual consideration of another person's feelings. The death of spontaneity in favor of coordination. And it gets worse over time. What starts as voluntary accommodation becomes expected sacrifice. Your partner doesn't just want consideration, they demand it. Your independence becomes selfishness. Your need for space becomes rejection. The very qualities that made you attractive, your independence, your passion for your own life, your mysterious autonomy are gradually eroded by the daily demands of partnership. Schopenhau saw this as psychological suicide. A man can be himself only so long as he is alone. And if he does not love solitude, he will not love freedom. For it is only when he is alone that he is really free. But marriage makes solitude selfish and freedom threatening. Your need for alone time becomes evidence that something's wrong with the relationship. Your desire to pursue individual goals becomes abandonment. Your very essence becomes a problem to be solved rather than a gift to be celebrated. And there's something even more sinister about how this happens. It's gradual, imperceptible. You don't notice your world shrinking until you realize you can't remember the last time you made a decision without considering someone else's reaction. You become half a person trying to be part of a whole when you were already complete to begin with. Which brings us to what you lose in the process. Arthur Schopenhau spent his life alone and it made him one of history's greatest philosophers. His solitude wasn't isolation. It was intellectual freedom. A precondition for reading good books is not reading bad ones. For life is short. But marriage makes everything urgent except what matters most. Your partner's needs become more important than your growth. Their crises become your emergencies. Their moods become your responsibility. Watch what happens to married people's ambitions. The artist stops creating because their partner needs attention. The entrepreneur abandons the risky venture because their spouse wants security. The intellectual stops reading philosophy because their partner finds it boring. This isn't conscious sabotage. It's the natural result of merging lives. When you're single, your time is your own. You can spend 4 hours reading, 6 hours writing, 8 hours pursuing a passion project. You can follow your curiosity without explaining yourself to anyone. But marriage turns your time into shared time, your energy into shared energy, your focus into divided focus. And here's what Schopenhauer understood about genius. It requires selfishness. Not cruelty, but the fierce protection of your inner life. The willingness to prioritize your growth over others comfort. The courage to disappoint people who want you to be smaller than you are. Talent hits a target no one else can hit. Genius hits a target no one else can see. But marriage demands you aim for targets everyone can see. Conventional success. Social respectability. Shared goals that represent the lowest common denominator of both partners' dreams. The married person becomes a committee. Every decision filtered through multiple perspectives watered down by compromise delayed by consultation. Meanwhile, the single person moves with the speed of individual clarity. This is why so many of history's greatest minds remained unmarried. Nze, Kant, Beethoven, Newton, Tesla. They understood that extraordinary achievement requires extraordinary focus and extraordinary focus requires freedom from ordinary obligations. But there's an even deeper cost to marriage that most people never consider. All satisfaction or what is commonly called happiness is really and essentially always negative only and never positive. Schopenhau understood that happiness is mainly the absence of suffering and marriage he observed is a guaranteed source of continuous low-level suffering not dramatic suffering something worse the quiet erosion of peace through constant emotional maintenance the death by a thousand compromises the slow strangulation of joy through routine conflict modern psychology confirms what Schopenhau suspected Married people report higher levels of stress, anxiety, and depression than single people. They sleep worse. They have less energy. They experience more chronic health problems. Why? Because emotional labor never ends. You become responsible not just for your own emotional state, but for managing, soothing, and accommodating someone else's. Their bad day becomes your problem. Their insecurities become your responsibility. Their happiness becomes your job. And here's the cruel paradox. The more you try to make your spouse happy, the more impossible the task becomes. Because happiness can't be outsourced. It can't be provided by another person. It can only be generated from within. But marriage creates the illusion that your partner's happiness is your responsibility and vice versa. This leads to endless cycles of blame, guilt, and resentment. Schopenhau called this the hedgehog's dilemma. Two hedgehogs trying to stay warm will get close enough to share heat, but poke each other with their quills. They'll move apart to avoid pain, but then get cold. They spend their lives in this dance of intimacy and distance, never finding the perfect balance. This is marriage in a nutshell. Too close and you hurt each other. Too distant and you feel disconnected. There's no sustainable middle ground because you're trying to solve a biological problem with a social institution. And it gets worse over time. What starts as passionate love becomes familiar irritation. The cute quirks become annoying habits. The mysterious becomes predictable. The exciting becomes routine. But society keeps telling you this is real love. The death of passion is called maturity. The loss of excitement is called stability. The erosion of joy is called commitment. Schopenhau saw through these euphemisms. He understood that what people call lasting love is often just two people who've given up on the possibility of genuine happiness and settled for familiar misery. A man can be himself only so long as he is alone. This is an antisocial misanthropy. This is the recognition that authentic selfhood requires space to breathe, think, and exist without constant negotiation. But our culture has demonized solitude. Being alone is seen as failure. Choosing solitude is seen as selfishness. Preferring your own company is seen as pathology. Yet, history's greatest minds understood something different. Solitude isn't the absence of connection. It's the presence of yourself. It's the opportunity to develop your own thoughts without the constant influence of someone else's opinions, moods, and needs. Schopenhau's most productive years were his most solitary. While his contemporaries were managing marriages, raising children, and attending social obligations, he was revolutionizing philosophy. He was exploring the deepest questions of human existence. He was creating work that would outlast every marriage of his era. The present moment is the only reality. But marriage keeps you trapped in planning for a shared future or managing the consequences of a shared past. You lose touch with the immediate experience of being alive in favor of coordinating two lives into one acceptable narrative. In solitude, you rediscover what Schopenhau called the will. Your authentic desires unclouded by the need to accommodate someone else. Your real values uncompromised by the necessity of finding middle ground. Your genuine interests unedited by the fear of boring or disappointing a partner. You can't give what you don't have. You can't love others authentically if you don't know yourself completely. You can't contribute to the world if you're constantly diluting your energy through the management of one person's expectations. The wise have always said the same things. And fools who are the majority have always done just the opposite. And what do the wise understand about relationships? that they work best between two complete people, not two halves seeking completion. That love flourishes in freedom, not captivity. That the best partnerships are between individuals who choose to share their fullness, not their emptiness. But this level of completeness can only be developed in solitude. Where you learn to entertain yourself, where you discover what you actually think about things, where you develop the inner resources that make you interesting rather than depending on someone else to make you feel interesting. The man who walks alone walks faster and freer. This isn't a consolation prize for people who can't find love. This is recognition of the superior path for those who value authenticity over approval, growth over comfort, truth over fantasy. Marriage is society's attempt to make permanent what nature intended to be temporary. It's civilization's effort to create security in a fundamentally insecure universe. It's the institutionalization of a biological drive that serves a species, not the individual. But you are not a species. You are an individual with unique gifts, distinct perspectives, specific purposes that can only be fulfilled by you. And fulfilling them requires the kind of focus, freedom, and authenticity that marriage systematically erodess. However, this doesn't mean you can't love or be loved. It means understanding that love is something you experience, not something you capture. It's a temporary state of consciousness, not a permanent arrangement. It's a gift to be appreciated, not a contract to be enforced. And when you understand this, something liberating happens. You stop trying to make permanent what is inherently impermanent. You stop trying to secure what is inherently uncertain. You stop trying to complete yourself through someone else and start experiencing the completeness that was always already there. Schopenhauer called this the sessation of willing. The moment when you stop desperately wanting what you don't have and start appreciating what you are. When you stop seeking happiness outside yourself and start recognizing the peace that exists in the absence of seeking. This is the wisdom of pessimism turned into practical philosophy. Not cynical bitterness about love, but cleareyed understanding of its true nature. Not hatred of marriage, but recognition of its fundamental incompatibility with human flourishing. So maybe the question isn't why am I not married, but why would I voluntarily limit my potential? Maybe it's not when will I find love, but when will I stop looking for completion outside myself. Maybe it's not what's wrong with me, but what's right with a life lived on my own terms. The smartest thing you can do isn't finding someone to complete you. It's the stupidest thing. The smartest thing actually is recognizing that completion was always an illusion. That freedom is more valuable than security. that authenticity is more important than approval. Arthur Schopenhau lived his truth and gave the world philosophical insights that have endured for centuries. His solitude wasn't lonely. It was productive. His independence wasn't selfish. It was generous. The man who walks alone walks faster and freer. And in that freedom, in that authenticity, in that courageous commitment to your own path, you offer the world something no marriage can. The full expression of who you actually are. If you have watched this video till the end, you deserve appreciation. Write in the comments, "I choose freedom.