Schopenhauer

→ Life is fundamentally about desire: to be alive is to try to satisfy your desires or wants

His view of happiness and suffering in life is, accordingly, related to desire:

    → Happiness is the satisfaction desire

    → Suffering is the dissatisfaction of desire

→ Schopenhauer claims that life is positive, which means that it is characterized by continuation and existence.

→ Death, on the other hand, is negative in the sense that cessation and nonexistence characterize everyone’s death

→ The positivity argument:
    1. Life is Positive

2. If life is positive, then it is characterized by suffering.

→ Therefore, life is characterized by suffering… ( dead people don’t suffer)

→ If life is positive, then it cannot be characterized by happiness, because it would be characterized by something negative

→ If life is positive, then it cannot be characterized by some neutral state between happiness and suffering, because then it wouldn’t be characterized by something positive.

→ The claim that life is characterized by suffering is pessimistic -> because it implies a pessimistic view about life’s meaning: No matter what you do, suffering is bound to happen, since life is characterized by suffering.

→ Happiness is rarely as good as we expect, and suffering is frequently worse than we expect

→ The fact that happiness is typically very brief in duration, and quickly gives rise to boredom, which is just another form of suffering.

→ The fact that world religions emphasize suffering in life.

→ We should not fear death being brought on use → death leads to the release of suffering

→ BUT we should not bring death on ourselves, for this only brings suffering onto others

→ We should instead be more compassionate, as fellow sufferers