What is the fundamental motivation of human beings - What is motivating us ?

2024-11-11

What is the fundamental motivation of human beings? What drives us to get up in the morning, and motivates us to get on with our lives? Do we wander haphazardly from place to place? Or are there as many motivations as there are human beings?

Today, it would seem that what motivates man is money, because even if it doesn't buy happiness, as the saying goes, it does contribute to it... and even leads to the destruction of our environment and demeans the way people are considered. The English philosopher and economist Adam Smith noted as far back as 1776: “It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the beer merchant, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from the care they take of their interests. We do not address their humanity, but to their selfishness; and it is never of our needs that we speak, it is always of their advantage[1].”

This leads to a rather gloomy vision of a selfish humanity, which doesn't reflect everyone's feelings. On a broader level, if we look at every being, every living thing on our planet, what motivates life as such? As experience shows, it obeys a single command: “survive!” Indeed, “we can consider that the goal of life is infinite survival. And it can be demonstrated that Man, as a form of life, whatever his goals and actions, obeys a single injunction: survive! That Man survives is nothing new. On the other hand, that man's sole motivation is to survive is new. Obedience to this injunction - survive! - does not mean that every attempt to obey it is uniformly successful. Environmental changes, mutations and many other factors militate against an organism achieving an infallible form or techniques of survival.” How might this apply to our daily lives? by understanding what pleasure and pain are. “The survival impulse is about moving away from death and towards immortality. We could conceive of ultimate pain existing just before death, and ultimate pleasure as being immortality. It could also be said that an organism or species sees immortality as a force of attraction and death as a force of repulsion[2].

So, above all, life is driven by survival. Man will instinctively seek the best survival for himself, his family, his group, his species, by avoiding pain and being rewarded with pleasure. How, then, to define the latter?