When Wanting Never Stops: A Humanist View of Schopenhauer and Billionaires

Arthur Schopenhauer argued that desire never rests, that satisfaction only fuels the next want. This essay takes that insight seriously in a modern setting, using billionaires as a living thought experiment to ask what happens when endless wanting is amplified by extreme power. From a Humanist perspective, the problem is not wealth itself, but what occurs when private desire reshapes shared institutions, markets and lives, forcing societies to confront the necessity of limits in a finite world.

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Money is supposed to be the finish line. That is the promise. Work hard, succeed, accumulate enough zeros, and eventually the engine shuts off. The wanting ends. The mind rests. The credits roll.

And yet, oddly, the people who reach the far end of the scoreboard never seem to leave the game.

Somewhere around the first hundred-million dollars, a quiet, polite voice clears its throat. It does not shout. It does not threaten. It simply asks, “What’s next?” This voice does not belong to the market, or ambition, or even greed in the ordinary sense. It belongs to something older, calmer and far more exhausting.

Arthur Schopenhauer gave that voice a name: the Will.

For Schopenhauer, the Will is not a moral failure or a psychological quirk. It is the engine of life itself: blind, restless and incapable of permanent satisfaction. Fulfillment does not silence it. Fulfillment merely gives it time to stretch, yawn and ask for something larger. When one desire is met, another steps forward, tapping its watch.

This makes billionaires philosophically interesting in a way Schopenhauer could not have fully anticipated. They are not villains in a morality play. Billionaires are a thought experiment that wandered off the page and bought their own media company. If money were capable of ending desire, a billion dollars is where it would happen. And yet the Will keeps working overtime, now assisted by advisors, lawyers and legacy consultants.

At a certain scale, wealth stops being about comfort and becomes metaphysical. It is no longer “enough.” It is never enough. It cannot be enough, because enough is not a category the Will recognizes.

Humanism enters this story not to condemn desire, but to notice something Schopenhauer largely set aside. The Will may be infinite, but human lives are not. Bodies age. Time runs out. Suffering counts, because there is no second draft, no afterlife audit, no cosmic refund.

If this is the only life we get, then the question is not why people keep wanting. The question is what happens when one person’s endless wanting quietly rearranges the conditions under which everyone else – here I repeat: everyone else, must live.

That is the billionaire problem – not as envy, not as outrage, but as ethics in a finite world.

The Will Does Not Retire

Schopenhauer’s most unsettling claim is also his simplest: wanting does not end because a goal has been reached. Wanting ends only when life ends.

We tend to imagine desire as a problem of scarcity. Not enough money, not enough time, not enough security. Solve the shortage and the problem should dissolve. This is the folk psychology of ambition: achieve X, then rest.

But the Will was never aiming at X. X was just the excuse it used to get out of bed.  X was just a mile marker on the road.

Satisfaction, in Schopenhauer’s account, is a brief administrative pause. A comma. A sip of water between marathons. The Will accepts the achievement, nods politely, and immediately begins scanning the horizon for the next project. When it finds none, it does something worse: it produces boredom. And boredom, Schopenhauer insists, is not peace. It is the Will pacing the room, irritated that nothing wants to be wanted.

This is why the idea of “enough” never stabilizes. Enough is not a quantity; it is a fantasy about closure. The Will does not seek closure. It seeks continuation. When ordinary people encounter limits, fatigue, failure, social constraint, the Will is forced to negotiate. When those limits disappear, the Will stops negotiating and accelerates.

At modest levels, this looks like ambition. At extreme levels and with success, it becomes abstract. Desire detaches from concrete needs and attaches itself to symbols: rankings, dominance, legacy, permanence. The wanting no longer asks for things. It asks to direct outcomes. It asks to lead, to shape the choices of others and finally to decide what happens next.

This is the point at which wealth stops behaving like money and starts behaving like metaphysics.

The billionaire, in this light, is not someone who has solved the problem of desire. He is someone who has removed friction from it. The Will now moves freely, unopposed by necessity, accelerated by scale. It no longer bumps into reality very often, which means it no longer learns anything.  This is a failure of feedback, not intelligence.

And this is where Schopenhauer becomes unintentionally funny. He imagined monks, ascetics and aesthetes attempting to quiet the Will through denial and contemplation. He did not imagine a world in which the Will, at the other extreme, would travel by private jet, command global platforms and employ a personal public relations team.

Which raises a question he never quite asked, but Humanism cannot avoid asking next:

If desire is endless, and power amplifies desire, the question is no longer psychological. It becomes institutional. What happens when amplified wanting does not stay private, but spills outward into markets, organizations and the background conditions of everyday life? At that point, desire is no longer just something one person feels. It becomes something other people must live with.

Prices rise and fall not because needs have changed, but because a large project has entered the room. Entire sectors reorganize themselves around someone else’s next idea. Communities adjust to priorities they did not choose. What began as personal ambition hardens into structure, into incentives, into defaults that quietly shape what is possible for everyone else.

From a humanist perspective, this is the critical shift. Desire has crossed a boundary. It is no longer merely expressive. It is directive. It sets the terms under which ordinary lives must adapt, absorb risk or make do. At that scale, endless wanting is no longer a private condition. It is a public force, and like any public force, it raises ethical questions about limits, accountability and shared control.

The Billionaire as a Controlled Laboratory Accident

Imagine a very serious experiment. White coats. Clipboards. A sign on the door that reads:

WARNING: REMOVAL OF ALL CONSTRAINTS MAY CAUSE UNEXPECTED WANTING.

Into this room we place a human being and give them a billion dollars. Not gradually. All at once. The subject blinks. The Will leans forward.

For approximately forty-seven minutes, things go well.

The subject experiences what economists call satisfaction and what Schopenhauer would call a clerical error. The house is purchased, along with an island. The plane is acquired. The mattress is upgraded to something that costs more than a community college. There is a brief, tender silence.

Then the Will clears its throat.

It does this politely. It always does.

“Excellent,” it says. “Now we should think bigger.”

This is the part nobody prepares for. There is no instruction manual titled What To Do When Wanting Survives Everything. The subject looks around for an exit ramp labeled Enough. There is none. There is only a hallway with doors marked More, Bigger, Influence, Legacy and, at the far end, a frosted glass door labeled Immortality (Metaphorical).

The Will does not run. It strolls. It has nowhere else to be.

Soon, money stops behaving like money. It becomes symbolic, then ceremonial, then vaguely religious. It is no longer used; it is expressed. It builds things that do not need to exist in order to prove that they can. It buys institutions, platforms and adjectives. The subject is now referred to as “visionary,” which is what happens when wanting acquires a press release.

At this point, boredom enters the room. Boredom is not the absence of desire; it is desire tapping its fingers on the table. Schopenhauer warned about this. When wanting cannot find resistance, it begins to eat its own tail, producing projects whose sole purpose is to keep the wanting occupied.

This is how the Will learns to start space programs. It is also how the Will learns to invest in politics. When markets no longer resist it and projects no longer teach it anything new, desire turns toward rule-making itself, seeking influence over the conditions that once constrained it.

None of this is a moral accusation. It is a structural observation. Remove friction from a system driven by endless desire and the system does not calm down. It accelerates. The billionaires are not proof that desire works. They are proof that desire does not stop working.

And now Humanism finally clears its throat.

Because while the Will enjoys infinity, humans do not. While the Will wants forever, bodies age, communities strain and consequences accumulate. The wanting may be metaphysical, but the effects are painfully terrestrial.

So the question shifts, not why the Will keeps wanting (that part is settled), but how much wanting one person is allowed when the bill is paid by everyone else.

A natural response is to say: fine, let them help. Let them give it away. And many do. Hospitals are built. Foundations are endowed. Press releases are issued. Real good is sometimes done.

But Schopenhauer’s point survives intact. Helping others does not end wanting; it merely gives it a new assignment. The Will does not retire into generosity. It reorganizes. It seeks outcomes, visibility, leverage and control, now under the banner of benevolence.

From a Humanist perspective, this matters. Aid is valuable. Suffering relieved is real. But a system that relies on endless wanting to decide who is helped, how, and when remains ethically unstable. From a humanist perspective, human flourishing, both individual and shared, should not be contingent on the personal priorities of any individual, however wealthy.

The Panic Response

This is where the experiment develops a reflex.

When society finally notices that infinite wanting plus infinite leverage produces side effects, it does what societies usually do: it reaches for boring administrative and procedural tools. Spreadsheets. Regulations. Taxes. The institutional equivalent of adding friction, saying, “Let’s slow this down.”

And this is when the billionaire panics.

Not mildly. Not thoughtfully. Existentially.

The reaction is rarely framed as, “I will have slightly less.” It is framed as, “They are coming for me.” Something sacred has been violated. Something primal. The Will, which had grown accustomed to open corridors and unlocked doors, suddenly encounters a velvet rope.

It does not like velvet ropes.

We create more billionaires than any society knows what to do with, and then we reach for taxation to reduce the concentration of wealth and fund the public goods everyone relies on. To the billionaire, this does not feel like social maintenance. It feels like shock. It is heard as, “You are taking my money and handing it to people who did not earn it.”

Taxes, in particular, are perceived not as a collective correction, but as an unforeseen disruption with potentially dire consequences to the billionaire. They imply that the billionaire is not the only one entitled to decide what happens next, that outcomes are subject to shared decision-making, not just personal ambition.

To the Will, this feels like an attack on reality.

The language escalates immediately. “Punishment.” “Confiscation.” “Class warfare.” The billionaire does not say, “I will still be extraordinarily wealthy.” He says, “This destroys incentives.” The Will has learned to speak in white papers.

What is striking here is not the resistance itself; everyone resists limits, but the intensity. The freak-out is wildly disproportionate to the actual constraint. A marginal tax rate is treated as a metaphysical coup. The suggestion that some outcomes should be collectively decided is received as a personal affront.

From a Schopenhauerian angle, this makes perfect sense. The Will does not fear poverty; it fears obstruction. It fears being told that it cannot simply proceed. Limits are intolerable because they show that the Will does not get to decide everything.

Humanism notices something else.

The tools society reaches for: taxes, rules, shared obligations, are not attempts to end wanting. They are attempts to contain it. They are reminders that while desire may be endless, the world it operates in is shared, finite and populated by other people who would also like a turn.

Seen this way, the panic is revealing. It shows that the conflict is not about money at all. It is about who gets to decide what happens next.

And the Will, having grown used to being in charge of that question, does not surrender it quietly.

The Humanist Interrupts the Experiment

Humanism is not impressed by infinity.

This is not because Humanism is small-minded, but because it owns a calendar. It knows about birthdays. Knees. Medical deductibles. It understands that time moves in one direction and does not circle back to offer refunds. Humanism looks at the billionaire experiment, squints, and says, “Okay, but who is cleaning this up?”

Schopenhauer watched the Will rampage through individual lives and shrugged. He diagnosed the disease and then retired to art galleries and metaphysical sighing. Humanism, unfortunately, does not have that luxury. It lives in a world where the Will does not stay inside one person’s head. It spills. It leaks. It buys zoning boards.

From a Humanist perspective, the problem is not that desire is endless. That part is merely annoying. The problem is that endless desire gains leverage. It acquires megaphones, lobbyists and think tanks named after abstract nouns. The Will, once personal, becomes infrastructural.

At this point, the Will starts rearranging furniture that other people are still using.

This is where Humanism draws a line, not in the sand, but on the spreadsheet. Finite lives mean finite tolerances. If one person’s wanting requires a thousand people to live with instability, precarity, or chronic anxiety, Humanism does not ask whether the wanting is sincere. It asks whether the arrangement is defensible.

The Will objects to this, naturally.

“I am just expressing myself,” it says.
“I am innovating.”
“I am creating value.”

Humanism nods patiently and checks the footnotes.

Value, it turns out, is not the same as well-being. Growth is not the same as flourishing. And innovation that produces permanent restlessness is not progress; it is motion sickness with branding.

This is the quiet Humanist claim hiding inside the joke: ethics exists because desire does not self-regulate. If the Will knew when to stop, we would not need moral philosophy. We would need naps. Instead, we need norms, limits and occasionally the awkward conversation where society says, “That’s enough wanting for one person.”

Not because wanting is sinful.
Not because success is evil.
But because other humans are not props in someone else’s metaphysical drama.

The Will hates this part. It calls it resentment. Humanism calls it responsibility.

And this is the pivot Schopenhauer never quite made. He saw that the Will never rests. Humanism adds: that is precisely why it cannot be given unchecked power in a shared world.

Epilogue: Inviting the Will to Sit Down

At some point, someone brings in a folding chair.

This is not a grand philosophical breakthrough. There is no thunder. No revelation. Just a very ordinary human gesture: Please sit. You’re pacing.

The Will does not like chairs. Chairs imply pauses. Pauses imply limits. Still, it sits, briefly, restlessly, checking its phone. It has three new ideas already.

Humanism does not try to cure the Will. It does not exorcise it, shame it or demand that it find inner peace. That would be naïve. The Will is older than reason and deeply unimpressed by sermons. Humanism simply insists that the Will share the room.

This is the quiet, unglamorous Humanist move: translating metaphysics into furniture arrangements. If the Will wants endlessly, then societies must decide where it is allowed to wander and where it is asked, politely but firmly, to stop rearranging other people’s lives.

“Enough,” in this view, is not a feeling. It is not contentment. It is not enlightenment.
It is a boundary drawn by finite creatures who know they do not get a second life to debug the first.

The billionaire problem, then, is not a story about villains or virtue. It is a reminder that success does not end wanting, and therefore cannot be trusted to regulate itself. When wanting acquires scale, ethics must acquire structure. Not to punish desire, but to prevent it from becoming architectural.

Humanism offers no utopia here. It offers something rarer: restraint without resentment. A willingness to say that while the Will may want forever, humans live briefly, and that briefness matters.

The Will stands up again, of course. It always does.

But now there are chairs in the room. And other people. And rules about where the furniture goes.

Which, in a world driven by endless wanting, is about as hopeful, and as human, as philosophy ever gets.