Ultimately, everything comes down to emotions. All motivation for action, and all action itself, is driven by emotion. I accumulate goals – things I want to achieve or obtain – and I can’t think of a single one that wasn’t driven by desire.

Humans are not automatons, blindly following a script (e.g. have sex, raise kids, die). It’s a bit more complicated than that; largely because our environment is more complicated. We need the ability to adapt, in the short term, to new stimuli and situations.

Emotions provide the “algorithm” to select goals, and work to achieve them. There is a near-infinite number of things an individual can do: whittling that down to a set of actionable items isn’t an easy task. Emotions provide that filter; people “want” status, companionship, love, power, etc. And people would like to avoid fear, pain, guilt, shame, and so on.

Overall, emotions are a pretty good method for navigating life.

However, I’ve found that difficulty arises when one’s goals are contradictory. For example: I want to learn about psychology, but I also want – in a much more immediate way – to sleep in, and languidly greet the day. I suddenly have a decision to make. A blind decision based on immediate emotions – e.g. which desire is “greater” at the time – is one way to “solve” the dilemma of what to do. It’s one that works pretty well, generally: typically, I get up in the morning.

One obvious problem to relying on emotion is that if you base your decisions on your emotions, you implicitly assume that your emotions are correct. However, emotions can (1) appear when confronted with incomplete, or misleading information, (2) be stunted, twisted, or damaged in the course of one’s life, rendering decisions made with those emotions rather poor indeed, and (3) be a tremendous source of internal strife when several emotions conflict.

Thus, you will inevitably run into situations where (1) you are forced to bear a great deal of stress, and (2) make poor decisions. People have “tools” to deal with this – cognitive dissonance reduction, for example, acts to reduce conflicting emotions by changing the underlying values that led to the emotions. And “rose-colored glasses ” will tend to make every decision seem good, or at least understandable, when viewed through hindsight.

The other problem – and the one I’m dealing with at the moment – is when you want to change your value system.

In these types of cases, you can run into situations where your existing value system is at odds with your “new” one. This is difficult to deal with, because the resulting emotions strongly discourage action to promote the new value system, leaving the status quo in place.

Given that “force of will” comes from your underlying value system, this makes attempting to modify it (or just outright replace it) somewhat… complicated.

I am beginning to believe that I will need to leverage some outside source of additional motivation (e.g. stimulate an emotion) to change my behavior. I am not sure what that is… religion is possible, but presents the same problems (having to accept a new value system). I suppose a rewards/punishment program would be most effective, given learning theory….

Decision making is never easy, but always seems simple. At any time, there are a finite number of things you can choose to do; knowing what choices you have does not seem particularly difficult.

For example, a high school student has, at any time, the choice of how much effort to put into an assignment. We can simplify this to three options:

1. put a tremendous amount of effort in;
2. put enough effort in to get a passing grade; perhaps a B in today’s era of grade inflation;
3. not do the assignment at all.

The choices are simple. The difficulty comes from how each choice impacts every other component of the student’s life. Parents may monitor the student’s grades, prepared to punish poor performance with sanctions sufficient to make choice (3) inadvisable. Choice (1) may seem attractive if the student intends to attend college, but pursuing it may make it difficult to spend time with friends; or perhaps be teased or mocked by friends for taking grades so seriously. Choice (2) may be the compromise.

This is a well-understood dilemma.

Evaluating a scenario, taking stock of the available choices, and forecasting potential results is difficult, and there is the distinct chance you will make a miscalculation, but there’s not much more to it. It’s a skill, and thus can be acquired through practice and mistakes. Life, I’ve found, is happy to provide opportunities for both.

I am interested in a related concept: What is a sufficient justification for making a choice?

For example, is “I don’t want to” a sufficiently good reason to avoid doing something? Is “I love it!” an ample explanation for a hobby? And is “I don’t care” reason enough to ignore something?

It seems, to me, that society at large – and by this I mean the culture of the United States – has accepted these as good reasons for behavior. People talk about pursuing their dream job, regardless of the cost; college students cite boredom and antisocial teachers to explain poor grades; parents respond gleefully to an indication that their toddler likes something. Of course, it seems equally true that there are times when “I don’t want to” has no bearing on behavior – few would turn away a family member in need simply because they don’t like them.

I am coming to believe that an emotion, in isolation, is never a sufficiently good reason for action; indeed, I am tempted to say that any transient emotion – desire, fear, anger, and the like – should carry no weight when making decisions.

Emotions are too vulnerable to manipulation to either be trustworthy or sustainable.

It is difficult to sustain an emotion, which makes it a poor reason for action. It is easy to become excited, but far more difficult to remain excited when faced with the prospect of work. If one’s justification for the work is the excitement, then the work will not get done. I admit that emotional reward may work in many cases, but only when the difficulty or likelihood of failure of the project remains below a certain threshold. If the probability of failure, or the difficulty, of the project increases above some threshold, the emotions attached to the project will change – for example, excitement at the chance for success changing to fear. It’s certainly possible in some cases to use the alternative emotion as a further motivator, but I wouldn’t recommend it. I would suggest that if you are relying on your emotional state to motivate you to work on a project, and you are succeeding, then the project does not challenge you.

I also find it difficult to trust an emotion – or, more accurately, to rely on an emotion being the same. Emotions are particularly vulnerable to delusion (false beliefs). A delusion will incite a corresponding set of emotions in the individual. I imagine that it’s possible to use these emotions to work on a project, or put more energy into something. For example, if you believe that when you die you will go to heaven, it makes it distinctly easier to face death. If you believe that sacrificing your life for God and Country will (1) help your friends and family, and (2) cause you to be rewarded in heaven with everything you ever wanted, it makes it somewhat more palatable to contemplate such a sacrifice. Suicide bombers fall victim to this delusion – their deaths seldom help their friends or family, and can directly harm them. Their rewards in heaven are possible, I suppose, if you accept their religion as fact; if you’re an atheist, it seems absurd.

These delusions have obvious benefit; they generate the emotional drive to perform an exceedingly difficult action.

The problem I have with them is what happens when the delusion is dispensed with. What if at a critical moment someone shatters your delusion? For example, a politician who believes that being elected will make his country a better place learns, halfway through his term, that his country is distinctly worse off as a direct result of policies he implemented? Leaving the possibility of him refusing to accept the fact and his responsibility for it behind, this would likely destroy his motivation for running for another term. (It might, of course, inspire him to correct his mistakes. But it might also ‘inspire’ him to commit suicide. Either way, he’s unlikely to run for re-election.)

There’s also the practical difference of establishing the delusion in the first place, and then the potential for distorting one’s perception of reality attempting to maintain the delusion.

The unreliability of emotion makes it a poor motivator; and thus, I believe, makes it an insufficient justification for action.

The difficulty I have now is discovering what else there is. Kant’s philosophy, rooted in obligation, solves the problem; but introduces others. For example: where does the motivation to uphold one’s obligations come from? There is the rather scary possibility that everything comes down to emotion (and delusion), which means that the best solution is one that is least susceptible to destruction.

I have, in the past week, attended two meditation sessions.

I have always been interested in meditation, in no small part because the mental techniques Buddhist monks use were popularized by New Age thinkers, and create discernable changes in the brain.

Thus far, I have only practiced the relaxing “breathing” meditation, where you focus on a sensation related to breathing. Meditation is the act of directing all your attention onto one thing; in breathing meditation, it is a physical sensation. A byproduct of doing this is quieting the incessant background noise that normally occurs in the mind. Personally, I find that my mind makes hundreds of connections – thoughts, notes, memories – each minute. This is very useful, but can be both tiring and distracting.

While breathing meditation relaxes me, that’s no why I’m so interested in.

Meditation involves controlling attention, and thought. Any form of meditation is a practice of that skill.

Coincidentally, much of life involves attention and thought. I find that the most difficult part of any project, large or small, short or long term, solo or team-based, is focusing on the project.

I have a tendency to distract myself when presented with a difficult task, or one that seems never-ending.

This cartoon, which I found on Russell Beattie’s site, illustrates the problem:

This results in the project taking more time than it should; since my time is limited, this means that projects that have deadlines end up being of lower quality than initial projections, and that all other projects in my life are delayed. The things that I want to do for fun and self-actualization – things without hard deadlines – are delayed indefinitely.

It’s actually taken me a surprisingly long time to realize that was the cause. I had previously attributed my lack of productivity to the general phenomenon of ‘procrastination.’ The problem with that proscription, unfortunately, was that it’s proved useless at solving it. I’ve read books on procrastination, and they are wholly unhelpful. I know how to plan, how to manipulate my emotional regard for a project, and so on. I still work slower than I am capable of, produce lower-quality work, etc. There’s no doubt that procrastination is a part of the problem – a tendency to delay projects to the last minute, because I can – but that’s not a difficult problem to solve, assuming I can focus efficiently.

If I can systematically apply what I learn in meditation to other areas of my life, I should become more effective. Well – that’s the Current Operating Hypothesis.