We will therefore turn to the less ambitious question of what men themselves show by their behavior to be the purpose and intention of their lives.
What do they demand of life and wish to achieve in it?
The answer to this can hardly be in doubt.
They strive for happiness; they want to become happy and to remain so.
This endeavor has two sides, a positive and a negative aim.
It aims, on the one hand, at an absence of pain and unpleasure, and, on the other, at the experiencing of strong feelings of pleasure.
In its narrower sense the word 'happiness' only relates to the last.
In conformity with this dichotomy in his aims,
man's activity develops in two directions, according as it seeks to realize —
in the main, or even exclusively — the one or the other of these aims.
What we call happiness in the strictest sense comes from the (preferable sudden) satisfaction of needs which have been dammed up to a high degree,
and it is from its nature only possible as an episodic phenomenon.
When any situation that is desired by the pleasure principle is prolonged, it only produces a feeling of mild contentment.
We are so made that we can derive intense enjoyment only from a contrast and very little from a state of things.
Thus our possibilities of happiness are already restricted by our constitution.
Unhappiness is much less difficult to experience.
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.
We tend to regard it as a kind of gratuitous addition, although it cannot be any less fatefully inevitable than the suffering which comes from elsewhere.
We owe to such media not merely the immediate yield of pleasure, but also a greatly desired degree of independence from the external world.
For one knows that, with the help of this 'drowner of cares' one can at any time withdraw from the pressure of reality and find refuge in a world of one's own with better conditions of sensibility.
As is well known, it is precisely this property of intoxicants which also determines their danger and their injuriousness.
They are responsible, in a certain circumstances, for the useless waste of a large quota of energy which might have been employed for the improvement of the human lot.
Sigmund Freud
