Transcription
Leo, I want to tell you today about a man who did not sugarcoat old age. He was born in Danzig in 178. He died in Frankfurt am Main in 1860, at the age of 72, alone in his apartment on the "schöne Aussicht" (beautiful view). His poodle was with him. His manuscript lay on his desk. His name was Arthur Schopenhauer, and he wrote something about old age that you will not read anywhere else. Not in self-help books, not in sermons, not in the kind lies with which we carry each other through the years. What did he write? He wrote the truth. In his late work, "Aphorisms on the Wisdom of Life," a part of the "Parerga and Paralipomena" from 1851, there is a chapter simply titled "On the Difference Between the Ages of Life." In this chapter, Schopenhauer described with the clarity of an anatomist what actually happens when a person gets old. Not romanticized, not cursed, described. And most readers have closed this chapter and wished they had never read it, because it tears down the lies with which we have comforted ourselves our entire lives. What lies? That old age is wise, that it is dignified, that it is a harvest for a life well-lived, that the old days are a crown, as Cicero wrote. Schopenhauer said all of that is false, or at least almost all of it. He said old age is not the ripening of a fruit. It is the gradual loss of what has kept us alive. It is the withdrawal of the forces that have blinded us. And whoever stands at the end of this withdrawal sees clearly for the first time. But they also see that there is not much left to see. That sounds very dark. It sounds dark because we are no longer accustomed to speaking honestly about old age. Our society pretends that old age is an enemy that can be defeated through sports, through diet, through surgery, through the right attitude. Schopenhauer knew better. He said: "Old age is not an enemy. It is the form that life takes when illusions have fallen away. And it is a very serious form, but it is also, and this is the paradox, the only form in which a person can truly become free for the first time. Free from what? Free from the will, from the urge that has driven us all our lives, from desire, from ambition, from the longing, from the belief that happiness always lies in the next hour, in the next year, in the next success. Whoever has grown old and understood what Schopenhauer described stops chasing. Not because they have resigned, but because they have realized that the game they have been pursuing their whole lives never existed. That is liberation. But it comes at a price, and the price is losing all that we have loved. I am ready to hear it. Seven dark truths about old age that no one tells you. None of them will make growing old pleasant, but all of them will change how you experience it and how you see those who have already arrived where you are still going. And if you have already arrived there yourself, then these truths will perhaps give you the feeling for the first time that someone has described what you are experiencing. Honestly, without a comfort blanket, without trivialization. That is Schopenhauer, and 160 years after his death, he is still the only one who has said it so clearly. Then let's begin. First truth. In old age, you become a witness, and to be a witness is the loneliest role a person can play. What did he mean by witness? Schopenhauer described it like this: In youth, you live; in middle age, you act; in old age, you watch. You watch life go on, but increasingly without you. You are still physically present, but the world no longer revolves around you. Decisions are made by younger people. Tastes, fashions, language change, and you understand them less and less. You become a spectator of a play in which you once had a leading role and which is now being continued by others. This describes something I have seen in older people. You have not only seen it in them, you will see it in yourself. Schopenhauer said: "It comes slowly. At 50, you notice that your younger colleagues look at you differently. Politely, but no longer as an equal. At 60, you notice that you often use the phrase "I remember" in conversations, and the others smile as if that were a sign of something. At 70, you notice that you become invisible on the street. No one sees you. You are an old man, an old woman, more category than person. And at 80, when you come home, you are only your own witness. You remember people, places, sensations that no one else in the world knows. And when you go, they go with you. That is a sad description. It is an accurate description, and Schopenhauer was not a sentimentalist. He did not say how sad. He said: "That's how it is." Old age is the time when the inner turns outward. In youth, you are full of the world. The world flows into you, and you are contained within it. In old age, the world gradually becomes empty, not objectively. The world goes on, but subjectively for you, because more and more people you knew are missing. Because more and more places you have been no longer exist. Because the languages you spoke are no longer understood by the younger generation. And in the end, only your own memory remains as the world. And memory also fades. What helps against this loneliness? Schopenhauer said, there is only one thing that truly helps, and it is not what most people think. It is not family. Family can help, but it can also become a burden, and it is mortal like everything else. It is not friends. Friends often leave before you want them to. It is familiarity with one's own mind. Whoever cannot be alone with themselves in old age is lost. Whoever has lived their entire life only in external things, work, family, society, will be homeless in old age. But whoever was accustomed to having conversations with themselves internally will find a room in old age that never grows cold. This is Schopenhauer's deepest advice to all who are still young. Build yourselves an inner world. Read, think, feel, because this inner world is the only thing that remains with you in old age when all outer worlds crumble. And for those who have not prepared, old age is hardship, but not hopeless. It is never too late to build an inner world. It is just more laborious in old age because there is less time and less energy. But even a seventy-year-old person who sits down for the first time and truly reads a book, truly with their full attention, will find something they have never had before. And these late discoveries are often the most precious because they are not consumed for a career, for an image, for some external purpose. They are read for their own sake, just as life in old age, if it is worth anything at all, is lived for its own sake, not for anything else. Just because. If you are over 60 and this first truth has struck you, write a comment: "Became a witness." If you are younger and have just felt something within you, "I understand what is coming." Both answers are honest, both are welcome. Second truth. Your body will become your first traitor in old age, and there is no making peace with it. Schopenhauer was a well-maintained man himself. He went for walks daily well into old age. That is true. He was more disciplined than most philosophers. He ate moderately, drank little. He walked every day with his poodle along the Main in Frankfurt, always the same routes, at fixed times. But precisely because he was disciplined, he saw more clearly than others what happens in the body. He said: "No matter how well you take care of your body, it will betray you. The only question is in what order." [sighs] [gasps] The eyes weaken, hearing loses the high tones. Memory begins to show gaps. Joints ache in the morning. Sleep becomes restless, digestion becomes a daily concern. And that's just the beginning. What comes later, anyone who has accompanied an old person for years sees. That sounds almost sober. Schopenhauer spoke soberly about it because he despised sentimentality. He said: "Complaining about the body helps nothing. Rebelling against it helps nothing either. What helps is to no longer consider it what we used to think it was." In youth, the body is a tool. You use it, it works, it is taken for granted. You don't think about it, just as you don't think about the air you breathe. In old age, the body stops being taken for granted. It announces itself, it complains, it fails, it becomes the main topic of your day. Schopenhauer said: "The moment the body becomes the main topic, the second half of life has begun. Whether you are 50 or 70, it is a biological threshold, not a chronological date." And what is Schopenhauer's advice? He had advice that sounds almost cynical today, but is deeply honest. He said: "Look at your body like a horse that you still have to ride for a while. Treat it kindly, feed it properly, but don't expect it to last forever, and don't make the mistake of identifying with it. You are not your body. You are what inhabits the body. When the horse gets old, you don't get younger or older. You are always the same rider, but the horse gets slower. It stumbles. One day it won't be able to go anymore, and then you have to dismount. Whoever has understood this suffers less from their old body. Not because the pain is gone, but because the pain is no longer taken personally. But we live today in a culture that says the opposite: "Stay young, stay fit, be your body." And this is one of the greatest sources of unnecessary suffering for old people. They look at their bodies in the mirror and compare them to the image that advertising has sold them. They see the wrinkles and think: "Something is wrong with me." They see the weaknesses and think, "I am failing." Schopenhauer would have said: "Nothing is wrong. You are not failing. You are following the law that all living beings follow. You are not behind. You are just at a different point on the line than the younger ones. And the younger ones will be where you are now in 30 years. This is not injustice, it is nature. Whoever has truly understood this stops fighting against the mirror. They look in the mirror and think, "This is what a person who has lived a long time looks like." This is an award, not a defeat. This is dignity, but it does not come automatically with age. It only comes when you have shed the lies of youth culture. Was Schopenhauer reconciled with his body in the end? He rarely spoke directly about it, but from the letters of his last year of life, we know that he suffered physically. He had breathing difficulties, his heart weakened. He died on the morning of September 21, 1860. His housekeeper found him sitting in his armchair, leaning slightly to the side. He had prepared himself, just as he had prepared for everything. His manuscript for the third edition of his main work lay finished on the table. His last wish was that his poodle be cared for. That was all. No last words for posterity, no staging. Just a man who rode his horse until it could no longer go, and then dismounted. Third truth. In old age, all your friends will die. And this is not a misfortune that befalls you. It is the structure of old age itself. This is a sentence that hurts. Schopenhauer knew it hurt. He wrote it anyway. He said: "Whoever grows old inevitably becomes a survivor. Not because they are strong, but because old age is by definition the state in which most others have already departed. At 50, you may still have your parents, your school friends, your work colleagues. At 60, it begins. One of your parents dies, perhaps both. At 70, you have attended several funerals a year. At 80, the list of the deceased is longer than the list of the living in your life. You go to funerals where you are the oldest. You walk through streets where all the houses give you memories of people who are no longer there. You become a living archive of a world that is slowly disappearing around you. This is the loneliness of old age. Schopenhauer made an important distinction. He said: "Being alone is not the same as being lonely. In old age, you will inevitably be alone. That is mathematics, not fate. But being lonely is a matter of inner state. A person who has been accustomed to being with themselves their whole life will experience old age less lonely, even if they are objectively alone. A person who has never been alone with themselves, who has only existed in the company of others, will be torn apart by old age. This is a choice you can make now in your middle years. Train yourself to be able to be alone, not because you are meant to be alone, but because old age will make you alone, and you should not be surprised then. Did Schopenhauer practice this himself, his whole life? He never married. He had few close friends. He had a strained relationship with his mother and sister. He often said: "My mind is my companion." This sounds lonely, but he did not describe it as a lack. He described it as the prerequisite for being able to bear the great loss, the death of all he knew. He outlived his mother, outlived his sister, outlived his few friends. Goethe, with whom he had once had conversations in Weimar, had died in 1832. Schopenhauer lived for another 28 years after that. He was at the end of those who knew him, who carried certain conversations, certain encounters, certain sensations in his memory. And he did not lament this. He saw it as what it was. The fate of all long-lived people. Is it then better to die early? Schopenhauer was too clear to answer this question simply. He said: "Both have their pain. Whoever dies early leaves behind mourners devastated by their loss. Whoever dies late has been the mourner themselves. Several times, for several years. But late death has an advantage that early death does not. Whoever lives long has time to truly understand life. They have time to see through illusions. They have time to prepare for the end. Not practically, but internally. Whoever dies at 30 often goes in fear. Whoever dies at 80 often goes in peace. Not because dying at 80 is easier, but because the 80-year-old soul has already practiced dying for a lifetime through every loss it has endured. If you have lost someone close to you in the last few years, write their first name in the comments. Nothing more, just the first name. Schopenhauer would have said: "Whoever can speak a name and not break has already worked through part of the pain, and you will see how many others will stand under your comment. You are not alone." Fourth truth. The wisdom of old age is not what you think. It is not acquired knowledge. It is the slow extinction of desires. But old people actually know more than young people. That is not quite what Schopenhauer meant. He did not deny that old people have more experience, but he said experience alone is not wisdom. There are many old people who have experienced a lot and learned nothing, who at 70 make the same mistakes as at 20, only with less energy. What Schopenhauer called wisdom was something else. He said: "Wisdom is the abatement of the will, not an act of cognition, but a process of liberation. In old age, desires weaken. You no longer want to experience everything. You no longer want to become famous. You no longer want to desire all attractive people. You no longer want your life to culminate in one last great work. That is wisdom. Not because you have answers you didn't have before, but because you have lost questions that tormented you before. This is a different definition than the usual one. It is the only honest one. Schopenhauer said: "Look at truly peaceful old people. What do they have? They have no more knowledge than other old people. What they have is less desire. They want less, and because they want less, they suffer less from what they don't have." Peaceful. This is the teaching of the Buddha, millennia old. Schopenhauer merely translated it into German, and he was one of the first Western philosophers to truly understand it. Suffering does not come from lack. Suffering comes from desire. Whoever desires less suffers less, even if they objectively have less. And old age is the time when desire naturally subsides. Not because you become more virtuous, but because the biological mechanism that generates desire, the will to live, gradually withdraws. It has done its job. It lets go. But some old people desire more and more. Money, recognition, security. Yes, and Schopenhauer saw that too. He said: "These people are tragic. They have not accepted the gift of old age, the natural extinction of the will. They continue to fight, even though their strength is waning. This is the source of bitter old people, stingy old people, resentful old people. They still want everything they wanted as a young man, but they can no longer achieve it. And in this discrepancy between wanting and being able to, bitterness arises. But whoever lets go of wanting at the same time as the reduction of being able, is at peace. They have no less than the bitter person, but they no longer desire what they lack. That is all. That is all that makes the difference. And how do you let go? Schopenhauer said, you don't let go by trying. Letting go that you try is not letting go. It is a new will, this time the will to let go. Real letting go happens through observation. You observe a desire within yourself. You see, this is my will, this is not me. I am the one observing the desire. And solely through this observation, without fighting, without suppressing, the desire loses its power. It is still there, but it no longer rules you. You have stepped aside. You have become a spectator instead of an actor. This is the wisdom Schopenhauer spoke of: not knowledge, but distance. And this distance often opens up only in old age, because the energy that previously drove the will forward is now weaker, and you can see for the first time instead of being swept away. So, is old age philosophically more useful than youth? Schopenhauer would have said: "Yes." He wrote: "Youth is a time of restlessness, old age is a time of insight." But he added: Insight is only accessible to those who have prepared for it. Whoever has not read anything in their youth, has not thought anything, has not practiced anything within themselves, will not gain insight in old age. They will gain lessons, television, repetition of complaints about the younger generation. But whoever has worked internally all their life, old age opens up something that youth could not. A clarity that is only possible when the storms have subsided. This is Schopenhauer's hope for old age, perhaps the only one he offered. Not to become happier, but to be wiser. And wisdom, he said, is worth more than happiness in the long run. Fifth truth. Retirement is not a reward. It is the hardest test most people will ever face. But people look forward to retirement. Yes, and Schopenhauer said they look forward to something they don't know. They imagine retirement as a permanent vacation, but vacation only works as a contrast to work. When work is gone forever, the contrast is also gone. And what remains is an endless time without structure. And most people are not prepared for that. Schopenhauer wrote: "Most people do not need their work for economic reasons. They need it because without work they do not know who they are." Empathetically. When work disappears, identity often disappears too. A person sits at the breakfast table and suddenly no longer knows what they got up for. They look in the mirror and see someone whose function in the world is no longer clear. And this is a lesson that many people only discover in retirement. That explains why some people get sick shortly after retiring. Exactly. Statistically, this is even provable. The first two years of retirement are a high-risk period for depressive episodes, cardiovascular events, cognitive decline. Schopenhauer had no statistics, but he had philosophical clarity. He said, the person who has lived their entire life only in their work often dies shortly after stopping. Not because their work was good for them, but because they had nothing to come after work. They had never built an inner world. They had never cultivated reading. They had never pursued a hobby seriously. They had no friends outside of their profession. Empathetically. And when work disappeared, the framework of their life collapsed. What remained was a person who no longer knew what to do with their time. And time without meaning is the most agonizing form of existence there is. How can one prepare for this? Schopenhauer's answer is clear, almost simple. Long before retirement, preferably decades before, you should start cultivating an identity beyond work. Read, study, practice an instrument. Cultivate friendships that have nothing to do with your profession. Go into nature, learn a language, write, paint, garden. It is not important what you do. What is important is that you do something that does not depend on your profession. Empathetically, if you do that, then the transition to retirement is not a catastrophe. It is just a shift in focus. You have always had a life beyond work. Now this life becomes the main thing, and if you are not prepared. Schopenhauer was not heartless. He said, if you arrive in retirement unprepared, it is not too late. But it will be harder. You will have to do at an age when energy is waning what you could have done with more ease in your younger years. The temptation is great to let yourself go, to fill the day with television, with complaints about politics, with repetitions of your past glories. Firmly. Schopenhauer said: "Don't do that, it's hell in slow motion. Dig instead, and this was his practical advice, start small, an hour of reading a day, a new piece of music a week, a walk in a place you don't know. Start small, but start. Otherwise, old age will not be a retreat from work, it will be a retreat from life. And those are two different things. In. If you are retired and do something new one day a week, write a comment: "I have my day." If you are still working and already know what your day will be, write: "I am preparing." Both answers show that you have heard what Schopenhauer said. Both are richer than most people. Sixth truth. In old age, you will understand that your life was shorter than you thought, and at the same time longer. And both truths are correct. That sounds paradoxical. Schopenhauer loved such paradoxes because they are often the truest things that can be said about human existence. He described the phenomenon like this: "In memory, your life appears short. You look back at 70 years, and they fit into an hour of memory. Images flash by, faces, rooms, individual moments, and the whole feels like an instant. You ask yourself, was that all? Where did the time go? But when you think of individual days, the day of your wedding, the day of your child's birth, the day your father died, then those days were long. They had hours that didn't want to end. They had moments that burned themselves into your memory as if they had been weeks. How can both be true? Schopenhauer said, because experience and memory are two different modes of time. In experience, time expands. A single moment of love or pain can feel infinitely long. In memory, time shrinks. It becomes an image, a scene, an impression. What took hours becomes a point. What took years becomes a phase with a few highlights. The lived life is always longer than the remembered life. And at the end of your existence, you do not have the lived life, for it has passed, but only the remembered one. And the remembered one is always short, very short, astonishingly short, considering it was a whole human life. What is the consequence of this? Schopenhauer drew a strange consequence, which not everyone shares, but which has always stayed with me. He said, since the lived life is longer than the remembered one, invest more in experiencing than in remembering. Live so that the hours are full, not so that the memory is full. Firmly, this is a reversal of the modern way of life. We often live today in such a way that we collect memories. We take photos, we travel to say that we have traveled. We live for a future in which we will look back on what has happened. Schopenhauer said: "That is wrong, that is a waste. Live for the experience itself. If you are sitting at the table eating bread, then it is the bread. If you are talking to someone, talk to them. If you are alone, be alone. Be awake in what you are doing. Firmly, because experience is the only reality. Memory is only its shadow. And collecting shadows is not a way of life. But memory is important in old age, isn't it? It is important, yes. But it is not what many people think. Schopenhauer said: "In old age, you realize that the memories that give you the most are not the big ones, not the wedding, not the career triumph, not the trip to Rome. The memories that truly give you something are the small moments when you were fully awake. A summer evening on the terrace when the light fell through the leaves. A conversation with your father that lasted an hour and in which you were both fully present. The moment your child called you by name for the first time. Firmly. These are the memories that provide support in old age. Not the spectacular events, but the awake moments. And whoever has not had a single awake moment in their life, whoever was always somewhere else, always distracted, always in the future or past, has little support in old age, even if they have experienced a lot externally. This is a different view of a fulfilled life. Schopenhauer would say, it is the only honest view. A fulfilled life is not one in which a lot has happened. It is one in which someone was often truly present in what happened. You can have traveled to 100 countries and not have a truly fulfilled life if you were not truly present in any of those countries. You can have spent your whole life in a village and have a fulfilled life if you have been awake every day in that village. Firmly, this is the hardest lesson because it turns our entire modern concept of life upside down. But Schopenhauer wrote it in 1851, and it becomes truer and truer the further our society moves away from wakefulness and the more it lives a life of stockpiling and documenting memories. The essence of life is the present, and in old age, you realize this sometimes painfully, sometimes satisfyingly, as the only truth that has remained. Seventh truth. Death in old age is not the end. It is the liberation from a drive that has ruled you for a lifetime. And in this sense, it is a homecoming. That is a strange statement from a pessimist. Schopenhauer was a pessimist about life, not about death. That is an important distinction that is often misunderstood. He saw life as driven by a blind urge, the will to live. We are all subject to this will. It makes us hungry, longing, dissatisfied. It drives us on, without ever letting us rest. But in death, this connection dissolves. The will disappears. What remains is not a consciousness that suffers in pain. For consciousness without will is possible. But pain without will is not. What remains is a form of peace that no living person can ever fully experience. A silence, a cessation of what has rushed us forward our entire lives. But what happens to the "I" that I am? Schopenhauer had a subtle answer that many readers only understand when they read it for the third or fourth time. He said: "What you call 'I' is a construction of the will. The will has given you a character, a personality, a history, so that you can fulfill its task in the world. But the deep essence that you are is not this personality. It is what Schopenhauer called the will, not in your personal form, but in its general being. When you die, your personality dies. But what you truly are, the will that flowed through you, is not personal. It has always been timeless. It does not die because it was never born. This is Schopenhauer's deepest teaching about death. You do not lose yourself. Because what you thought you were, was never truly you. What truly was you cannot die. That sounds almost religious. Schopenhauer was strongly influenced by Buddhism and the Upanishads. He was one of the first Western philosophers to take Eastern texts seriously. But he also clearly stated, this is not religion, this is metaphysics that everyone can verify for themselves, not through faith, but through deep reflection on what consciousness truly is. He said: "Whoever truly understands that the will is the root of all suffering will no longer fear death, because they understand death as the end of the will, and thus as the end of suffering." This is not weariness of life, it is not a wish for death, it is simply the abolition of fear. Schopenhauer did not fear death, but he did not seek it either. He simply knew that death was the end of something he had understood his whole life: the drive to continue, no matter the cost. And in old age, death draws nearer. In old age, death not only draws nearer, it becomes familiar. This is one of the experiences that cannot be told if you have not had it yourself. Young people think of death as an abstract horror. Old people think of it as a neighbor. They have seen so many people die, parents, friends, siblings, that death ceases to be foreign. It becomes a part of life, an extension of experience. Schopenhauer said: "This is a grace of old age that is not accessible to youth. Whoever is old has often already begun to die internally. Many small deaths, each loss a small death. And in the end, physical death is the bundling of these many small deaths into a single act. It is not to be lamented. It is the form of life. And what remains for those who are left behind? The hardest thing, he said.
Schopenhauer. When an old person dies, it is a release for themself. Like a performer who, after a long play, is finally allowed to leave the stage. But for the spectators who loved them, the missing begins. This is the peculiar [music] asymmetry of dying. The dead are at peace, if one follows Schopenhauer. The living carry the pain. But Schopenhauer also said, this pain is a form of love that is still there, even though its object is no longer there. Grief is the trace of what was loved. It is not a betrayal of the deceased. It is the last loyalty. Whoever loses an old person they loved should not try to get over it quickly. They should mourn as long as it is necessary. And then, when the acute grief subsides, they should preserve the memory, not as a burden, but as that which allows the deceased to remain present in the world of the living for a while longer, beyond the threshold, until the one remembering also departs, and so on, generation after generation. This is the chain in which dying makes sense. If at all, in this sense, if you are preparing yourself for your own old age or accompanying an old person, write a comment: "I am walking this path" and try to walk this path. Schopenhauer would have smiled. He rarely smiled, but he would have smiled at this sentence, because the only thing he truly recommended for old age was to walk it, not to flee, not to lament, to walk it with dignity, as far as possible. The hardest thing, said Schopenhauer, when an old person dies, it is a release for themself [music] like an actor who, after a long play, is finally allowed to leave the stage. But for the spectators who loved them, the missing begins. This is the peculiar asymmetry of dying. The dead are at peace, if one follows Schopenhauer. The living carry the pain. But Schopenhauer also said, this pain is a form of love that is still there, even though its object is no longer there. Grief is the trace of what was loved. It is not a betrayal of the deceased. It is the last loyalty. Whoever loses an old person they loved should not try to get over it quickly. They should mourn as long as it is necessary. And then, when the acute grief subsides, they should preserve the memory, not as a [music] burden, but as that which allows the deceased to remain present in the world of the living for a while longer, beyond the threshold, until the one remembering also departs, and so on, generation after generation. This is the chain in which dying makes sense, if at all. If you are preparing yourself for your own old age or accompanying an old person, write a comment: "I am walking this path." Schopenhauer would have smiled. He rarely smiled, but he would have smiled at this sentence, because the only thing he truly recommended for old age was to walk it, not to flee, not to lament, to walk it with dignity, as far as possible. And the seven truths summarized: Majestic. First, in old age, you become a spectator. You go from the main role to the main role, then to the audience. And the only home that remains is the inner world you have built, or have not built. Second, your body will be your betrayer. There is no making peace with it, but you can stop identifying with it and thus stop experiencing its slow decay as a personal defeat. Third, all your friends will die before you, or you before them. Old age is the time of [music] solitude. Whoever cannot be alone with themselves will be ground down. Whoever can, finds a harder, but bearable form of existence. Fourth, the wisdom of old age is not acquired knowledge. It is the extinguishing of desires. Whoever desires less in old age suffers [music] less, even if they objectively have less. And this is the secret of all truly peaceful old people. Fifth, retirement is not a siege. It is the hardest test that most people encounter. Whoever has lived their entire life only in work falls into a void that many do not survive. Whoever has prepared themselves enters a phase of deep freedom. Sixth, in old age, you will understand that your life was shorter than you thought, and at the same time longer. Both truths are correct, and the lesson from them is for experiencing, not for remembering. Be awake, be present. Seventh, death in the end. It is the release from a drive that has governed you your whole life. What you truly are cannot die, because it was never born. What you thought [music] you were was a construction. It dissolves, but the deepest [music] being remains. If anything remains, it is that. This is a difficult, but comforting lesson. It is comforting [music] for those who understand it. It is hard for those who do not want to understand it. Schopenhauer said: [music] "Most people will experience their old age without ever having thought about what old age is. They will be surprised, they will complain, they will be bitter." But for the few who have walked awake, who have prepared themselves for [music] old age through reading, through reflection, through the quiet practice of renunciation, for them old age is not a defeat. It is a phase in which the world becomes clear for the first time. Not because it becomes more beautiful, but because the veils that have shrouded us for a lifetime are gradually shed. What would Schopenhauer say to me today if I could ask him? He probably wouldn't advise you. He had no use for agreeable advisors. But if you pressed him, really pressed him, he might say this: "Build yourself an inner world while you still have strength. Read, think, cultivate what does not depend on the world. Do not let your identity lie solely in your work. Then you will lose yourself when the work ends. Do not let your happiness lie solely in other people. Then you will break when they die. Do not let your worth lie solely in your youth. Then you will experience old age as a fall. Instead, build something within yourself that goes with you when everything else goes. That is all, and it is enough. Old age needs no more. It cannot have more. This is clear advice. It is Schopenhauer's only advice, [music] but it is the advice our culture needs most urgently and hears least. And to you, who have traveled this far with me, you now know seven truths that Schopenhauer spoke about old age, which awaits us all, if we do not die sooner. None of them [music] will make getting old more pleasant, but all will change how you experience it and how you look at the older people in your life, who are going through exactly what Schopenhauer wrote about. I have a task for you. Tonight, before you fall asleep, ask yourself a single question, as honestly as you can. What inner world have I built for myself? What remains for me when all externals fall away? Most people never ask this question until it is too late. But if you ask it today, truly ask it, not just theoretically, then you begin to prepare yourself for what otherwise catches everyone else unprepared. Write in the comments which of the seven truths has affected you most deeply. Not the most interesting, the most uncomfortable. Because the most uncomfortable is the one you need right now. Like this video, [music] if Schopenhauer has reached you today. Not for the algorithm, for you, so that you show yourself that you did not look away when the question was asked, which most people shy away from their entire lives. Subscribe to Mein Abgrund for weekly journeys into the depths of thought. Last week Zoran and the seven brutal truths about birth. Next week Thomas Bernhard. Seven brutal truths about the world, the family, and dying. And share this video with someone who has just retired, or with someone who is accompanying an old mother, an old father, or with someone who has themselves become old and wonders if this is all there is. They all face the same questions, and Schopenhauer is one of the few who has answered them honestly. Until the next journey into the abyss, Leo. And don't forget, whoever has an inner world is never completely alone. Not even in old age, not even at the end. Good night. Good night. What would Schopenhauer say to me today if I could ask him? He probably wouldn't advise you. He had no use for agreeable advisors. But if you pressed him, really pressed him, he might say this: "Build yourself an inner world while you still have strength. Read, think, cultivate what does not depend on the world. Do not let your identity [music] lie solely in your work. Then you will lose yourself when the work ends. Do not let your happiness lie solely in other people. Then you will break when they die. Do not let your worth lie solely in your youth. Then you will experience old age as a fall. Instead, build something within yourself that goes with you when everything else goes. That is all [music] and it is enough. Old age needs no more. It cannot have more. This is clear advice. [music] It is Schopenhauer's only advice. But it is the advice that our culture most urgently needs and hears least. And to you, who have traveled this far with me. You now know seven truths that Schopenhauer spoke about old age, which awaits us all, if we do not die sooner. None of them will make getting old more pleasant, but all will change how you experience it and how you look at the older people in your life, who are going through exactly what Schopenhauer wrote about. Tonight, before you fall asleep, [music] ask yourself a single question as honestly as you can. What inner world have I built for myself? What remains for me when all externals fall away? Most people never ask this question until it is too late. But if you ask it today, truly ask it, not just theoretically, then you begin to prepare yourself for what [clears throat] otherwise catches everyone else unprepared. Write in the comments which of the seven truths has affected you most deeply. Not the most interesting, the most uncomfortable. Because the most uncomfortable is the one you need right now. Like this video, if Schopenhauer has reached you today. [music] Not for the algorithm, for you, so that you show yourself that you did not look away. When the question was asked, which most people shy away from their entire lives. Subscribe to Mein Abgrund for weekly journeys into the depths of thought. Last week Choran and the seven brutal truths about birth. Next week Thomas Bernhard. Seven brutal truths about the world, the family, and dying. And share this video with someone who has just retired, or with someone who is accompanying an old mother, an old father, or with someone who has themselves become old and wonders if this is all there is. [music] They all face the same questions, and Schopenhauer is one of the few who has answered them honestly. Until the next [music] journey into the abyss, Leo. And don't forget, whoever has an inner world, [music] is never completely alone. Not even in old age, not even at the end. Good night. Good night. Yeah.