Have you ever heard of "Hedgehog's dilemma"?️
When a hedgehog feels cold, it starts looking for its brothers in order to cling to them until it feels warm. The problem is that the thorns on the hedgehog’s body make the process of rapprochement with other members of his species difficult and painful, given that whenever they get close to each other, the thorns on their bodies hurt them, so they decide to stay away from each other, then they feel cold and get closer again, and so on.
In the year 1851, the German philosopher Schopenhauer pondered the situation of the hedgehog and considered it one of man’s social-psychological dilemmas. He called it: Hedgehog’s dilemma.
Schopenhauer said that a lonely person feels a strong need to get close to people and interact with them, and that loneliness remains very harsh and painful for a normal person (like cold for a hedgehog), so he decides to act like the hedgehog and search for his own kind and cling to them for psychological warmth.
The problem is that this attachment and closeness will not be a source of happiness and comfort for him all the time, but rather the opposite, a source of pain and fatigue (for himself and for his peers), and here many negative feelings are generated such as psychological pressure, embarrassment, separation, and others. Just as a hedgehog is forced to harm his peers, the same issue is with humans (he will not intentionally hurt anyone), but it is human nature and each of us has thorns!!
Theoretically, the hedgehog found a solution to this issue, and devised a simple, successful method, a process Schopenhauer called the safe distance. The hedgehog was able to choose a certain distance of safety, a distance that guaranteed him sufficient warmth, and at the same time the lowest possible degree of pain.
Sometimes called the porcupine dilemma, it is a metaphor for the challenges facing intimate human relationships. It describes a situation in which a group of hedgehogs seek to stay close together to exchange heat during cold weather. At the same time, they must stay apart to avoid hurting each other with their thorns