Thursday The Primary Drive

My activities today consisted of meeting Lauren in the afternoon followed by Japanese buffet in the evening followed by drinks at SMU’s Ice Cold Beer place.

There was one topic which was shared between my two meetings today, and that is Sex, or rather the hold of sex over all of us.

Lauren was telling me about her aspirations of becoming an air stewardess after her graduation this semester. But midway she told me about how she will not last long inside because of the heavy weight-age of supervisor appraisal and how they use it as a leverage to extract sexual favors from the stewardesses. Considering how she thinks that women are to be protected and she feels that somehow she can change the situation, she will not last long in there.

When I was with Simiao and company, the topic covered a few areas including the cost of education, food, and somehow involved some talk on the hold Sex have over us all.

Hence today’s topic will be about Sex. Not the pornographic type of course, but more of the Freud type. Freud believes that we humans have many drives or motivations to engage in any endeavor, but most of these drives are secondary. Such as hunger, thirst and the need for shelter or warmth, Freud argues that the primary drive instilled in humans is the drive for carnal satisfaction. That is also to say that the basic reason why we do anything at all within our lives is so that we basically get laid.

Think about it, why do we go to school? To get an education, most would answer? I am sure most people pursue education not because they have an insatiable thirst for knowledge and understanding of the operation of the world. To get a good job, to get a good salary, to get a good life, some would say. We can attribute this to the sub conscience drive to appear attractive by contemporary standards so that one would be able to attract a mate more easily, as they say, the better you market the easier you sell.

A simple thought experiment would help elucidate my point. Imagine all of us cannot have sex and the way our species reproduce is through age, like once you reach 30 everyone will get pregnant, and we are all sexless.

Simply put, entire industries would never have existed, the cosmetic industry, the match making industry, hell even the shoe industry would not have been so big. Would we have the motivation that we have today if the situation was as such? I reckon not.

Few of us like vegetables but most of like sweet stuff, ever wondered why our body was programmed this way? Greens are good for us and sweets are bad for us, why is it such that we have an attraction towards something detrimental to our health and impartiality towards something good for us?

Well, I have thought of it, and I actually found out why. During the early days of the human race, sugar was a rarity, something hard to find and even harder to extract from their source. Whereas vegetables were common and easily acquired, our body needed both sugar and vegetables. Hence, biologically humans developed a certain chemical release in the brain that would occur when one consume sugar, hence rewarding the person’s hard work in obtaining this rare nutrient. This “good feeling” is the motivation for the person to dig the ground or climb higher for rarer fruits; a reward for the trouble.

It happened this way because our body needed the sugar from fruits or what not, it was part of the body’s proper functioning.

Similarly, our race, the human race, needs to produce the next generation. As a species, part of its proper functioning is to produce the next generation, this function I might argue is the most important function, and everything else will be for nothing if the species cannot continue.

And as we all know, getting some one to mate with us is a very difficult task these day. Gone are the cave man days of bashing a female over the head and dragging her body home. Hence the ultimate good feeling is ascribed to the action of reproduction, and hence it goes hand in hand with humanity’s ultimate pursuit, Sex.