What drives our actions? We typically assume that the ultimate aim of all our efforts is to have a happy life. And a happy life, in general, is attained by securing a stable job, marrying someone special, hoarding a mountain of stuff, having friends, expressing yourself, and if the planets align just right, perhaps even achieving some vague sense of purpose before death rudely interrupts. If we check all of these, we’ll have it all. We’ll be satisfied. We’ll no longer look for more. Yet, is this really what happens?
What truly drives our behavior? The thing that fully characterizes our existence?
This philosophical question has tormented many thinkers. Many thinkers endlessly wondering why humans keep making the same mistakes.
Enter Arthur Schopenhauer. Born in 1788, he was raised in a household of privileged but emotionally barren merchants. Young Arthur was schooled to become a salesman, a commerce person – a respectable, money-chasing cog in the commerce machine, just like his father. But Schopenhauer, after following the footsteps of his father for a while, realized that this profession was tedious and shallow.1 Instead, he devoted his life to philosophizing. And in 1818, he published a book that explains what, according to him, largely drives our behaviors. His central work: The World as Will and Representation.2
What he discovered? Desire. The fundamental reality of any existing thing is that he/she/it wants. Desires endlessly. Relentlessly. Schopenhauer called this the will to live.3
Based on this now-proclaimed gloomy prophet of existential despair, the will to live is the noumenon “thing-in-itself” in humans. The core component guiding our actions. The great cosmic itch that can never be scratched. The ever-hungry, never-satisfied force that puppeteers our every move.
In layman’s words, if we looked at the foundational component, the main concept that characterizes humans, we’d find that we are want-machines. Driven purely by cravings, desires, and will. Hidden from our awareness, but pulsating in all our activities.
Schopenhauer didn’t arrive at this conclusion through some divine religious feeling, abstract knowledge, or strange dissection of consciousness. No, his philosophy was mostly born from his intimate inner experiences, observations, and a personal history of disappointments.
Schopenhauer was not the only one who wanted to introspect and find what’s the core component of existence. Before him, René Descartes concluded the famous, “Cogito, ergo sum.” Or in English, “I think, therefore I am.”
Yet, Schopenhauer opposed this rationalistic approach. He argued that the essence of any subject is not rational. It is not thinking. It is not reason. But the constant desire – the will to live. Desire is the most typical thing for a human being. Desire, not thinking, is the fundamental and original act.
I hope this introduction excites you about what we’re going to explore. We are going to analyze how the will influences our motives, goals, and consciousness. How the will precedes reasoning. How the will, based on what the mind shows it, starts to want, to pursue, to strive towards.
All of this, considering the ever-entertaining chaos of the modern world.
What Exactly is the Will to Live?
In every one of us, there is pulsating energy, a force which we can call will – or the will to live as pointed out above. This force is characterized by an incessant impulse of irrational, impersonal striving. But the interesting thing here is that the will by itself doesn’t desire anything specific. No, it is unconscious and undirected. Its activity is a constant becoming without an end.
Schopenhauer explains it as follows:
Hey there, sorry to interrupt…
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- Arthur Schopenhauer. Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Available at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_Schopenhauer
- The World as Will and Representation. Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Available at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_World_as_Will_and_Representation
- Will to live. Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Available at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Will_to_live
- Nesi, J. and Prinstein, M.J. (2015) ‘Using social media for social comparison and feedback-seeking: Gender and popularity moderate associations with depressive symptoms’, Journal of Abnormal Child Psychology, 43(8), pp. 1427–1438. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10802-015-0020-0
- Social media, dopamine, and stress: Converging pathways. Dartmouth Undergraduate Journal of Science. Available at: https://sites.dartmouth.edu/dujs/2022/08/20/social-media-dopamine-and-stress-converging-pathways/
