What are we living for?
This essay on the science of love deals primarily with the question of how we can provoke and manipulate others so that a person by whom we want to be loved loves us. Nevertheless, I want to address some less technical and more philosophical issues as well.
Why, in the first place, do I dedicate so much of my creative energy to trying to find out how love works? Financial interest definitely is not the engine behind it. If my interests were financial, I would never have chosen writing as a profession.
I dedicate so much of my energy to thinking and writing about love because it is so essential to my philosophical outlook.
I have not elected to be born, and I would have been thankful if my parents could have been more restrained around the time I was conceived. I don't really believe that there is any use in being alive. Most life really is just suffering. And for what? When we're dead, it will just be the same as if we were never born. Our selves exist only in the realm of thought, but they are bound to the temporary existence of our bodies. The moment we die, it's all over.
I see no advantage in living, but I'm a victim of nature. A rather essential mechanism of all living matter—an instinctive fear of death, nonsensical as it may be—prevents me from doing what reason might suggest, which is to simply not continue. I lack the will to override that instinct.
I have read many books on the philosophy of death and dying. It may sound strange, but I find a certain comfort in reading about the finality of existence. Nevertheless, I'm not decrepit enough yet to let go, or not courageous enough, or just too firmly in the grip of that mechanism of all living matter: an instinctive fear of death.
Not seeing enough sense in being alive but afraid to simply give up, I pass my time in the pursuit of those moments when I forget the whole wretched mess.
In my late teens and early twenties, I was quite happy chasing nothing but sexual intercourse. I wanted women to fall in love with me so they would let me in. I regularly had a steady girlfriend, but I never stayed long with a particular one. It wasn't so much that they couldn't satisfy me. Rather, many other women I encountered too easily aroused me. I usually preferred a new one over the previous one. I liked the challenge and the newness, and I could be single-minded for hours when starting a new relationship. No melancholy and no thoughts on the future or the past. Just determined to copulate. It was a time of ready erections, and I could reach a climax easily... though I did usually aim for full intercourse. I didn't care so much whether the women were beautiful, as long as they were willing. I never had to worry whether my approach would work.
But I have lost interest in that lifestyle.
Now there has to be more than just willingness on their part. They have to be in love with me, I have to be in love with them, and the whole affair needs some tragic elements. I could never just hire a prostitute.
Have I become a victim of my own success? I have been with a number of women, and though in more recent years some of the women I met in less prosperous countries may have had economic considerations, none were prostitutes.
If my problems were diagnosed as boredom because of too much sexual experience, I'd happily agree to a dose of Alzheimer's.
On the other hand, the expertise I have gained in the science of love has been born out of the same difficulty. For many years now, easy solutions are no longer an option for me. Love and sexuality have to be something extraordinary to these women, which really disqualifies casual encounters. It has to be love, not just sex, in order to give me that kick which makes me forget the meaninglessness of life. I need to be involved in a Romeo and Juliet setting in order to be really entertained.
I'm strange in another way, too. Even though I don't hold my own life in high esteem (it's such an unimportant flash in time), I do go a long distance to preserve the little value that it has. I'm a law-abiding man, primarily because being jailed would destroy every perspective of getting out of life the only thing that matters—those moments in the arms of a desired woman when I can forget the whole wretched mess.
I'm also extraordinarily careful to avoid accidents because becoming disfigured would have the same effect as being jailed. And I eat healthy, don't drink, and don't smoke, because all of this would interfere with either a sufficiently appealing presentation of myself or with my own ability to enjoy what really is the only thing worth living for.
If I'm not pursuing a love affair, all I'm doing is preparing for one, either by taking care of my financial basis or by improving, in any way, the position from which I start—e.g., learning a language for a place where I want to find a new girlfriend, or working on my physique, or studying options for the future. I practically don't waste any time on any other entertainment. All I do is just in service to the pursuit of that specific little happiness that lets me forget the worthlessness of my own existence.
And mind you, I'm not depressed; I'm just realistic. I simply don't like to fall victim to illusions about the sense of living. The sad truth is, there is none.