Unlove Me

Men strive to gain happiness and keep suffering away.

We are threatened with suffering from three directions: from our own body, which is doomed to decay and dissolution and which cannot even do without pain and anxiety as warning signals; from the external world, which may rage against us with overwhelming and merciless forces of destruction; and finally from our relations to other men. The suffering which comes from this last source is perhaps more painful to us than any other.

Under the pressure of these possibilities of suffering, men are accustomed to moderate their claims to happiness; a man thinks himself happy merely to have escaped unhappiness or to have survived his suffering, and if in general the task of avoiding suffering pushes that of obtaining pleasure into the background. The accomplishment of this task can be attempted along very different paths; and all these paths have been recommended by the various schools of worldly wisdom and put into practice by men.

The crudest, but also the most effective among these methods of influence is the chemical one - intoxication. Nobody completely understands its mechanism, but it is a fact that there are foreign substances which, when present in the blood or tissues, directly cause us pleasurable sensations; and they also so alter the conditions governing our sensibility that we become incapable of receiving unpleasant impulses.

Another technique is that of shifting the instincts in such a way that they cannot come up against frustration from the external world. One gains the most if one heightens the yield of pleasure from sources of psychical and intellectual work. If someone is capable of doing so fate can do little against him. Think about an artist’s joy in creating or a scientist’s in solving problems or discovering truths. The weak point of this method is that it is not applicable generally: it is accessible to only a few people.

Another procedure is to make love the center of everything, to look for all satisfaction in loving and being loved. It, too, aims at making the subject independent of Fate. It locates satisfaction in internal mental processes. It does not turn away from the external world; on the contrary, it clings to the objects belonging to that world and obtains happiness from an emotional relationship to them. Love is not aimed at an avoidance of un-pleasure. It passionately strives for a positive fulfilment of happiness. And perhaps it does in fact come nearer to this goal than any other method. The weak side of this technique of living is easy to see; otherwise no human being would have thought of abandoning this path to happiness for any other. It is that we are never so defenseless against suffering as when we love, never so helplessly unhappy as when we have lost our loved object or its love.

To set somebody free and to throw somebody away are not the same.