I’m with them.

The German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer warns us that human beings have two main enemies: pain and boredom. We use our intellects to guard ourselves from pain. But once we have escaped it, the mind keeps whirring on, demanding new objectives, new distractions. So off we go into folly. We gamble (and often lose); we have affairs (and fracture our marriages); we provoke quarrels. By their nature, our minds cannot rest. The problem with that happy life we’re pining for is that it will inevitably breed boredom, and boredom begets trouble.

Schopenhauer wrote that against boredom, a man has “a great many fancied remedies, balls, theatres, parties, cards, gambling, horses, women, drinking, traveling.” These are temporary palliatives. Soon we’re bored again.

Schopenhauer’s solution? Find something to occupy your intellect. We can collect coins or stamps, learn about insects and birds, acquire languages, read good books and summarize them in our journals. Do not let the mind succumb to idleness. Most scenes that people associate with happiness — the golden beach, the splashing waterfall — are boredom traps.

Simone de Beauvoir also argues for activity over passive forms of happiness. Like her collaborator Jean Paul Sartre, she thought that the most dangerous temptation was what she called “being-in-itself” (in French, être-en-soi). People who cultivate being-in-itself want to embody a standard of perfection. They strive to show others that they are complete and whole. This is a condition, Beauvoir argues, that is especially tempting for women and girls. Everyone encourages them to be pretty, self-contained, perfect. The girl “must make herself object; she must therefore renounce her autonomy. She is treated like a living doll, and freedom is denied her,” Beauvoir writes in “The Second Sex.”

Boys and men are also tempted by stasis; they’re encouraged to grasp an identity and never leave it. But the boy, if he is willing, “carries out the apprenticeship of his existence as free movement toward the world.”