EMOTIONS
Feelings?
Sometime between October and November 2019, I ate pizza for my dinner every day, If it was a weekend then I had pizza for lunch and dinner. Do I hate pizza now? NO, Absolutely fucking not. This also happened recently from 1st of Feb to March 10th, I skipped lunch almost every day and had ice cream.
Why did I do? Well, the short answer is feelings. It helped me survive in an unknown city.
I know pizza every day is not good, skipping lunch is the worst. Almost everyone told these weird disease names that I could get if I keep skipping lunch. Even my logical brain kept saying what I was doing is wrong and I should eat at least something. But, my feelings mind didn’t want to. I felt good when I skipped lunch for ice cream. Things like pizza, chocolate, and ice cream make me feel good and that’s the reason why I kept doing it. It was also this period of time I kept going to a lot of movies and spent all my fucking pay on weekends and went to restaurants all by myself and had a treat. Again it felt good.
Now you as a reader, understand that whatever I did is stupid and shouldn’t have done it. I absofuckinglutely agree with it. I knew I shouldn’t be eating that Icecream but my feelings say “Hey Bo, you had a rough day, play some punk rock and get ice cream, you’ll feel good!” and suddenly what feels good becomes the right thing to do!
This made me understand that whatever feels good is not always the right at least, most of the time.
I was driven by my feelings, I kept doing whatever felt good.
“Emotions drive our action”
Feelings are temporary and they only exist at the moment they arise. They can’t tell me what will be good for me the next week, month or year!
I’ve been reading about Stoicism and I’ve come to find that Stoics do have a distinct approach to the emotional life. They don’t expect emotions to be good guides for behavior. Treat your feelings like the weather. Like choosing to not let the rain keep you from leaving my house, we don’t let our emotions take over our day or make our decisions for us.
“If you feel crappy, it’s because that’s your brain telling you that there’s a problem unaddressed or an issue unresolved. In other words, negative emotions are a call to action. When you feel them, it’s because you’re supposed to do something. Positive emotions, on the other hand, are rewards for taking proper action. When you feel them, life seems simple and there is nothing else to do but enjoy it. Then like everything else, positive emotions go away, because more problems inevitably emerge.” — Mark Manson.
In short, it is we who decide what our feelings mean and whatever feels good is not always right. I don’t mean to say that feelings are not important, they are, but for the right reasons.
“If you are distressed by anything external, the pain is not due to the thing itself, but to your estimate of it; and this you have the power to revoke at any moment.”
― Marcus Aurelius, Meditations
