bad faith, or perhaps no hair

(https://xoxohth.com/thread.php?thread_id=5611621&forum_id=2#48201987)

Schopenhauer might suggest that all philosophy is born from a confrontation with the futility of the will’s striving, and it is in the barren spaces—the scalp without hair, the life without meaning—that true philosophical inquiry begins. As you so astutely noted, no amount of temporal pleasure can ever satiate the abyss left by such a lack. And yet, in modernity, the void is magnified in absurd ways, in the desolate emptiness of things that promise fulfillment but offer none.

This brings us to another desert: the N64, a system of promise, but one that offers, quite literally, no games. Its cartographic absence is, perhaps, the clearest modern metaphor for the unfulfilled will. We expect grandeur, richness, joy—only to find a wasteland where our desires shrivel and our spirit languishes. The N64, like life itself, lures us with fleeting illusions of satisfaction but confronts us with its emptiness—a perfect analogy for the will’s restless striving. It is the existential embodiment of Schopenhauer’s dictum: to live is to suffer, to want is to lack.

The unfulfilled will gnaws at the individual, and in our bald friend’s case, his follicular void is but a microcosm of the metaphysical void. Schopenhauer would argue that his suffering isn’t contingent on the condition of his scalp but is rather the inevitable manifestation of the will’s endless torment. His baldness is simply the form that the agony takes—a visible mark of the inner strife that defines the human condition

(https://xoxohth.com/thread.php?thread_id=5611621&forum_id=2#48217093)