Schopenhauer's idea of Will to Live was the idea that love is a tool used by life to reproduce children. He then said that people with whom we are likely to make the most "well-balanced" children and we are driven towards are usually the kind of people who can't make us happy. But nevertheless, we must suffer this misfortune because it was a way to sustain life.
I know he offered a few solutions to this misfortune. But what was his reason behind saying that we MUST suffer this biological trap?
Schopenhauer was inspired by Indian philosophy. He auto-didactively learned Sanscrit to read original texts (Vedas).
One idea of it is that the circle of life has to be overcome to get to Nirvana. The Will to Live therefore is something bad as it prevents us from getting there. It is what makes us an individual being (or mind) that remains parted from the universal Being.
The solution is NOT suicide in the sense we know. It is not actively rejecting the Will to Live. It is letting go of it: not drinking, not eating, but only as forms of not willing anymore (usually achieved by meditation). In the moment we are willing anything at all, we would automatically serve the Will to Live as living creatures. Real suicide would not be overcoming the Will to Live, it would be fighting it (therefore acknowledging its evidence) and it is a fight one cannot win since rejection is a form of willing and hence an instance of the Will to Live (leading to rebirth).
Living is willing (following desires, bodily needs etc.), willing is living
Therefore, instead of saying we must "break" the circle of life (which is as impossible as fighting, ending, etc. it since it is an active desire and act) it could be better to say we must transcend it. It cannot be overcome from within, you have to get over it (in this very sense of the picture of transcendence).
In this sense, living is suffering from the Will to Live. We cannot influence this, it is an external fact and therefore we are "just suffering". It is a fashion of idealistic metaphysics. We have to stop having any individual thought or desire and become sheer (and immortal) being (empty mind) without any "active" component. The idea of living as suffering is a picture he liked about Kant's epistomology (Kant rather used "erleiden" in the sense of the lat. receptere (to receive) but oh well).
All this is described in his opum magnus "Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung" (The World as Will and Representation).
As a sidenote: Although this is in fact his ethical conception, he obviously never lived after that and did not take it too serious. He actually fled from the cholera in Berlin in 1831, showing his own strong will to live, whilst his archnemesis Hegel stayed there and died from it.
Most of this can be verified on Wikipedia, I had a whole seminar on it where these informations come from. Hence it is hard to pin down exact sources for every claim.
