On Life

Un-pleasure is due to desire unfulfilled while pleasure is a result of desire fulfilled. But the desire itself is not un-pleasure.

Therefore, the degree of pleasure/ un-pleasure is determined by the amount of desire fulfilled, which is again determined by the intensity of the initial desire and the remaining desire after actions have been taken to fulfill the desire.

When no desire is existent, there is no pleasure or un-pleasure, which is essentially death.  Therefore, life should not be about reducing one's desire (being calm), and happiness is not the same as calmness.

            Life is essentially driven by desire. To live is to desire. The more intense the desire, the more pleasure if fulfilled or un-pleasure if unfulfilled, the more alive life is. To be alive is to feel pleasure or un-pleasure, it doesn't matter which.

According to Freud (From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia):

Humans were driven by two conflicting central desires: the life drive (libido) (survival, propagation, hunger, thirst, and sex) and the death drive (Thanatos). Freud's description of Cathexis, whose energy is known as libido, included all creative, life-producing drives. The death drive (or death instinct), whose energy is known as anticathexis, represented an urge inherent in all living things to return to a state of calm: in other words, an inorganic or dead state. Unpleasure refers to stimulus that the body receives. Conversely, pleasure is a result of a decrease in stimuli. If pleasure increases as stimuli decreases, then the ultimate experience of pleasure for Freud would be zero stimulus, or death.

Given this proposition, Freud acknowledged the tendency for the unconscious to repeat unpleasurable experiences in order to desensitize, or deaden, the body. This compulsion to repeat unpleasurable experiences explains why traumatic nightmares occur in dreams, as nightmares seem to contradict Freud's earlier conception of dreams purely as a site of pleasure, fantasy, and desire. On the one hand, the life drives promote survival by avoiding extreme unpleasure and any threat to life. On the other hand, the death drive functions simultaneously toward extreme pleasure, which leads to death.  

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