In the middle of the 19th century, the German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer was grappling with a problem: Why do people seek out relationships when they cause each other so much pain?

In response to this troubling phenomenon, he wrote a parable known today as “The Hedgehog’s Dilemma.”

Here is how it begins:

One cold winter’s day, a number of hedgehogs huddled together quite closely in order through their mutual warmth to prevent themselves from being frozen. But they soon felt the effect of their quills on one another, which made them again move apart. Now when the need for warmth once more brought them together, the drawback of the quills was repeated so that they were tossed between two evils, until they had discovered the proper distance from which they could best tolerate one another. ¹

Schopenhauer draws a parallel between the behavior of these fictitious hedgehogs and humans in real life. 

Just as the hedgehogs can’t get too close to each other or they’ll get hurt, so too must humans keep their distance from one another – even at the expense of sometimes feeling cold and lonely. This, according to Schopenhauer, is the trade-off we must make if we’re to get along with people in life. 

More than a century and a half after Schopenhauer’s death we see this parable in action everywhere: plenty of people, afraid of rejection or betrayal, choose instead to “play it safe” and avoid getting too close to anyone. They stunt their emotional growth and sometimes even sabotage all their relationships.

These extreme cases often arise from trauma or other serious life events and they deserve specialized attention. It’s dangerous, though, to think that the Hedgehog’s Dilemma only applies to these individuals and not the rest of us who have more “normal” lives.

The truth is that pride and an instinct for self-preservation (along with a healthy dose of present bias) keep us from reaching out and being closer to people far more often than we realize.

While we might not notice its effects day to day, this sort of casual attitude towards people and relationships can ultimately come back to haunt us.

We Regret Not Making Time For People

In 2012 a palliative nurse named Bonnie Ware shared a list of the 5 most common regrets of the dying. Ware was an experienced caregiver who had talked with hundreds of individuals during their final days. 

The fourth regret on the list may or may not come as a surprise to you:  “I wish I had stayed in touch with my friends.”

Ware’s patients admitted that in their final moments, they thought of – and missed – their old friends. But because they’d allowed themselves to be too busy and too distracted over the years, they had fallen out of touch. Now that they were dying there was little time left to reconnect, and sometimes it wasn’t possible to get in touch at all. 

Ware’s discovery is not unique, either. In one of the largest surveys on regret ever conducted, the two biggest regret categories were, respectively, “family,” and “partners.” In other words, people tend to have a lot of regrets in their relationships, period. ².

There are many reasons for this, but the Hedgehog’s Dilemma almost certainly plays a role.

Humans are not intuitive about what will make them happy in the long run. Whether due to a holdover from evolution or something else, we focus on immediate outcomes over distant ones. And one of those more pressing immediate outcomes is, “Don’t get hurt. And don’t go out of your way for anyone – especially if it means you could get hurt!”

This modus operandi makes perfect sense at first. It keeps us alive and safe. It saves us time and energy. It’s only after years of the compounded effects of not being closer to others do we finally start to realize just how lonely we are for our friends and loved ones.

Overcoming the Hedgehog’s Dilemma means overcoming our naturally evolved tendencies so that we live a fuller, less lonely life. Done right, we can experience warmth and closeness to others without continually worrying about being “pricked.” We do not need to suffer like Schopenhauer’s hedgehogs.

There is no universal answer for how to do this, but here are three helpful ideas:

1. Keep a Positive View of Life and Others

Our experiences shape our views, and our views in turn predict our future experiences. Most of the time we do this without thinking.

One of the trickier maneuvers in life is to keep our views positive, even when we have experiences that are negative.

This means choosing to see the good in others, and to have hope in the possibility of being closer both to those we already know and to those we may not have met yet. A positive view of life is not a Pollyanna-ish one; it’s a proactive one. It’s one in which we see each new person and encounter as an opportunity for greater fulfillment, even if we’ve been hurt in the past.

As we cultivate an attitude of warmth and openness to others, we’ll find the universe bending to meet us where we’re at. Not everyone will be our new best friend, and we can’t force anyone to love us, but there will be those who are also looking and ready to connect with us. You may never be close to your difficult dad or your prickly sister – and some friends may choose to disappear – but there will be many others who will be happy to step in and fill your life. 

In contrast, when we allow negative experiences to harden us we create a self-fulfilling prophecy in which others won’t want to stick around because of our unpleasant attitude. One of the best examples of this is Arthur Schopenhauer himself.

Schopenhauer lived a remarkably lonely life despite his prolific career as a writer and philosopher. His father died suddenly when Arthur was still a teenager, most likely by suicide when he drowned in a canal near their home. He had a terrible relationship with his mother who, rightly or wrongly, called him an “unbearable” person. He had few close friends, no wife or long-term partner, and near the end of his life, he lived completely alone except for his pet poodles.

Schopenhauer was constantly burning bridges. He became notorious for insulting others he disagreed with, both in writing and to their faces. At one point, he even injured a neighbor woman when he violently pushed her away from the entrance of his home – he spent the rest of his life paying her an annual pension after she won a lawsuit against him.  

Against this backdrop, it’s easier to see where Schopenhauer might have been coming from when he wrote about the Hedgehog’s Dilemma. Because his own life was filled with social conflict we can see why he might take more a pessimistic view of human relationships. ³

It’s not that Schopenhauer was entirely wrong in his views, either. Connection to others does require us to get hurt sometimes. That’s the price we pay. We have a choice in our attitude, though. By adopting a positive attitude we naturally armor ourselves against the “spikes” of disappointment and hurt feelings so we can stay warm and close to others.

2. Reach Out First

“Much of friendship is defined by ambiguity,” notes relationship expert Marissa Franco. “It’s rare that people straight up tell us whether they like us or not.” ⁴

This more or less self-evident truth is why so many of us hold back from trying to be closer to others. No one wants to be rejected, so the easy thing is to let the other person make a move first. If they don’t, we assume, it’s because they don’t like us enough. (Never mind the fact the other person might be thinking the same thing).

Every healthy relationship does require some degree of mutuality. That much is obvious. But we don’t do ourselves favors when we second-guess how someone feels about us when we’ve already had an enjoyable time together. 

The key to overcoming our instinctive insecurity is to assume the people we like also like us too, unless they blatantly let us know otherwise. Most people don’t initiate more often in relationships because they’re insecure or distracted by mundane, urgent things – not because they don’t care.

The more we protect ourselves, ironically, the more we hurt ourselves.

I thankfully somehow learned this lesson earlier on in life.

As an early twenty-something, I was far too aware of how often I called someone “first”, versus how often they called me first.  My simplistic thinking was that if two people liked each other equally, they would naturally find some sort of 50/50 arrangement. If the other person didn’t reach out, it meant they didn’t care.

Because I liked my friends so much, it was easy to feel insecure if they didn’t reach out as much as I did. But I noticed that whenever we did catch up, it was always a great experience that left us both feeling full and happy. So I made a mental shift.

I decided to reach out to my friends whenever I thought of them, and to hell with my insecurities. What I found was that every single time I did, they were happy to reciprocate and we always had a great time. Over the years, some have thanked me for staying in touch – they recognize that it requires both thought and effort. ⁵

It’s not natural for people to put themselves out there. And yet we need the connection if we’re to grow as humans.

Franco puts it much more eloquently:

“Connection affects who we are, and who we are affects how we connect. When we have felt connected, we’ve grown. We’ve become more open, more empathetic, bolder. When we have felt disconnected, we’ve withered. We’ve become closed off, judgmental, or distant in acts of self-protection.”

The more we protect ourselves, ironically, the more we hurt ourselves. Fostering close relationships means ditching the tally score, reaching out first, and trusting that our common sense will tell us when the other person is happy to connect with us and when we need to look elsewhere.

As we reach out again and again, to both new and old friends, we will reap the compounding returns of those interactions for years to come. 

3. Show More Affection and Gratitude

In her studies on friendship, Franco made an interesting discovery on the difference between “regular” friendships and friendships of the deepest and closest kind. The key factor was affection.

People who feel close to others, and who want to continue to feel close, reinforce those feelings by showing affection. This needn’t be dramatic displays of hugging, kissing, or poetic declarations (unless that’s your style) – affection can be as simple as letting the other person know you like and appreciate them. 

Our self-preserving instincts tell us that it’s weird to give our friend a spontaneous hug or to tell them how glad we are to have them in our lives. But these acts of affection are the magic ingredient that will help people feel closer to us and more likely to show affection in return. Affection creates the conditions for loyalty and security.

It doesn’t help that our culture today often values sarcasm and flippant witticisms over sincere, direct expressions of love and admiration. It might require extra creativity to be affectionate without being awkward. But the rewards are well worth it.

Just as important as affection is the need to show gratitude. 

The anthropologist Robin Dunbar found in a study of conversations in eight different languages (from different parts of the globe) that people rarely expressed gratitude to each other for helping or giving. The catch? All of the people in these conversations were family members or close friends. ⁶

The sad implication here is that most people tend to take those they love most for granted. We save our expressions of gratitude for strangers or acquaintances we hope to make a good impression on. We think of immediate outcomes (“I need to let my boss know I was grateful for his help so he’ll keep helping me!”) rather than the long-term consequences of how we interact with the people we care about most.

A simple remedy to this is to be more conscientious: when you realize how short your time is on earth, and how uncertain the future can be it makes much more sense to acknowledge our loved ones whenever we get the chance. The wonderful thing about expressing gratitude is that not only does it improve our relationships – including those small everyday interactions – but it also gives us an immediate boost of well-being. It puts everything into perspective.

Most people will choose the easier, more passive option in their relationships — and in life. It will come at a cost, and they risk becoming another one of the patients in Bonnie Ware’s study, wishing they had reached out to friends and loved ones more.

But when we realize how important relationships are to our lifelong happiness, we will be willing to put ourselves out there and do the work. When we do this, others will respond in kind. And when we’ve done so, we’ll realize that we can overcome the Hedgehog’s Dilemma and live a life filled with more love and less regret.

***

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1. Schopenhauer, A. (1851). Parerga and Paralipomena: Short philosophical essays. Oxford University Press. volume II, chapter XXXI, section 396, pages 651–652. Note, in this translation the word “hedgehog” is accidentally rendered “porcupine.”
2. This survey, called the American Regret Project, was conducted by journalist Daniel H. Pink and his colleagues. You can view the results here.
3. Schopenhauer is actually nicknamed “the philosopher of pessimism,” thanks to his very cynical views about human nature. That said, it’s only fair to add that he made huge contributions to philosophy and influenced the likes of Freud and Nietzsche. Like many great thinkers, his legacy is complicated.
4. Franco, M. G. (2022). Platonic: How the science of attachment can help you make–and keep–friends. G.P. Putnam’s Sons.
5.  Many of my remarkable friends have also been very proactive in reaching out to me, too. I’ve realized that there are many types of personalities and friendship styles in this world. Everyone is a unique package.
6. Dunbar, R. (2022). Friends: Understanding the Power of our Most Important Relationships. Little, Brown UK.