“There is no such thing as fear,” Rasputin replied. “Emotions are just energy and motion that you trap inside your body because of a thought.”
Emotions—what a tricky thing to understand!
What purpose do they serve in our life? Do they make us strong or weak?
As an INTP, I have mixed feelings about emotions.
There is this movie called Lucy, starring Scarlett Johansson. The plot of the movie revolves around the concept that human beings, on average, use only up to 10% of their total brain capacity in their lifetime.
The protagonist, Lucy, gets exposed to a certain kind of drug that gradually unlocks her brain to reach 100% of its capacity. And, as one would expect, crazy things happen.
Now, without getting into the nitty-gritty details, spoilers, or logical flaws of this Hollywood flick, I’d like to focus on one interesting aspect of Lucy’s transformation—as she gains intelligence, she loses emotions.
Does this mean that emotions make us weak?
If you think about it, emotions play a critical role in our lives. However, it seems that role is quite limited.
As Mark Manson suggests in his book The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck,
“Emotions serve a purpose: they are your brain’s way of telling you something good or bad is happening in your life. … Your emotions are simply feedback mechanisms designed to let you know whether things are going well or not. That’s it.”
Following that advice, emotions should be nothing more than a response generated in our mind when one or more sensors are actuated.
For instance, when you touch a hot object, you feel pain and a burning sensation. Based on this emotion, your brain generates a reflex to immediately pull the hand away.
You can still choose to put your hand back on that hot object and keep feeling the same pain over and over. You might even decide to not pull your hand at all and let it keep burning. That’s your choice.
This means that emotions themselves do not make us strong or weak, but the role we let them play in our judgments might.
Some situations in life fill us with happiness and excitement, while others overwhelm us with depression and fear. These are emotions telling our brain whether to go ahead and do what we want to do or pull ourselves away.
The energy from these emotions can either make or break a situation—the decision is always being our own.
It would be wrong to generalize by saying it is always correct or incorrect to feel an emotion, but we can definitely consider its interpretation.
By definition, emotions aren’t accurate because they do not follow any laws of logic. In fact, from my personal experience, I’ve observed that decisions made purely based on emotions rarely stand the test of time.
But I realize that it’s easy to misinterpret the message that our emotions want to convey.
On the other hand, decisions made based on a combination of logic and emotion (80/20?) might be difficult to execute but rewarding in the long run.
Emotions are undoubtedly a critical part of our identities as human beings. So it goes without saying that suppressing them is never a good idea. Without them, we would be as good as life-induced AI machines.
But it is equally important to give emotions only the attention they deserve and nothing more, so when they arise, we are conscious enough to understand what they want to convey without unconsciously getting swayed by them.
What do you think?
