The birds have started singing really early lately. There’s something surreal about hearing them at 3am on that life-giving journey from library to vending machine, halfway through the second essay crisis of the week. Everybody has those death periods. You start to develop your own coping habits. Coffee and Quavers or Eton Mess fudge or meticulously planned tea breaks or forty-five minute conversations in which you try to name every single incidental character that’s been in the OC. Essay plans become infected with that kind of sleep-deprived whimsy that causes you to write things like ‘Now Descartes that shit up’. And you watch your friends fall into semi-existential woe, as they lie on the library floor and vent about life and its misgivings. Schopenhauer would have loved Week Five.

The archetypal pessimist, reading Schopenhauer can sometimes feel like listening to that insidious voice in your head that surfaces every time work and life gets too much and asks you that question loaded with pathos; ‘What’s the point of everything?’ The idea that such a voice could be right is a pretty scary one.

Happiness for Schopenhauer is an illusion. We have wants and we’re sure that once we satisfy them we’ll be happy. And maybe that’s true. But happiness is such a fleeting feeling, we can’t crystalise ourselves in it. If we’ve fulfilled all our wants, we’ll only go and get bored again. The solution? Desire more things, find more goals, more about us that could be better or more obstacles in the way of that lasting happiness that we know we’re going to get someday. And so ‘fooled by hope man dances into the arms of death’.

It’s fair to ask how, with the knowledge that we’re doomed to live our lives with all the foresight of existential lemmings, are we possibly supposed to be happy? One thing is to realise that betting everything we’ve got on some vague idea of future happiness isn’t going to work. Here we’re constantly experiencing burnout. People push themselves to be the best and to achieve things. And these things have to be concrete and tangible. Surrounded by an almost insane amount of talent, we can easily succumb to that voice telling us we need to get a first, or to make it as an actor or debater, or get that five star review. But really as soon as we get any of those things we know that boredom ‘like a bird of prey’ is ready to fall on us and make us want to push ourselves further.

Schopenhauer wanted to show that happiness, all happiness, is an illusion. But how much more futile is the kind of happiness that means a term or a year or three years of an unfulfilled life before it’s realised. If it’s only going to slip through our fingers anyway then why sacrifice that much for it? That’s not to say we should abandon any aspirations, just that if we can’t say we’re enjoying trying to reach them, then maybe they’re the wrong ones to have in the first place.

In a recent interview Jesse Eisenberg talked about a kind of ‘kitchen fridge syndrome’. As a child you draw for fun and you’re satisfied doing it. The day your mother decides a picture is good and it goes on the kitchen fridge, you realise you like that feeling. The next time you go to draw, it’s with the fridge in mind. It’s at that point, the point where we become self-aware about what’s going to make us happy, that we first lose our grip on it. Sport and music and art and acting and writing and academia should all be things that have the power to move and motivate us in their own right. We get to play around with ideas, we get to get excited and make things, and we get to challenge ourselves to see what we are capable of doing.

For Schopenhauer life is like running down a mountain and going too fast to be able to stop and enjoy the experience until it’s all over. When Week Five hits and it becomes difficult to see the point in keeping going, maybe it’s not just a question of getting on with it, but of finding a way of running we can live with. That or more Quavers.