My relationships with emotions

Until around one year ago, I lived my life by cultivating three different points of view. They are not topics that were constantly on my mind, but rather three different frames I can apply to my lived experience. It’s like adding colored borders around the video stream from my eyes and thoughts, allowing me to look at the same data but changing my relationship with it.

First, there is the point of view of the universe, which I described in a previous post. It’s what the world looks like when you zoom out, when you see Earth from the stars, when you don’t perceive the state of the world as it is in any instant, but rather see the trajectories of all the objects unfolding far in the past and the future. It’s a static sculpture, outside of time, where actions no longer exist. When I experience the world from this point of view, I am just a hole through which the world is seen. I am inspecting incredibly small details of the sculpture Alexandre happened to enter in contact with, cultivating an awareness of all the connections they bear with the rest of the universe.

From this point of view, I look at the sculpture with contemplation. What kind of patterns appear beautiful from up there? What is worth contributing to? What looks fun and interesting? What should we strive for as a civilization?

Then there is the rational mind point of view. The rational mind is tied to this body and history; it cannot remove itself from these constraints. It is tree-like in this sense: it is the result of a seed that happened to land near some immovable rocks, it will have to grow around them.

The rational point of view is an ideal version of the human, stripped of all its cognitive biases. From this perspective, I strategically reason about how to turn the universe’s scale motivations into goals that can be pursued by this specific human (me), to which the rational point of view’s destiny is inescapably tied. In this point of view, I form plans and deliberate on career and life goals. The rational point of view is aware that it is running on human hardware. It doesn’t try to force the human into a formal system; instead, it seeks to develop heuristics that are robust to cognitive biases and can be passed to the human to guide their life on a day-to-day basis.

Finally, there is the human point of view. This is the perspective in which I spent 99% of my waking existence. This point of view engages in normal human experiences, feeling hunger, attraction, tiredness, boredom, and excitement. It is the frame that feels like “no frame.” It takes into account the output of reflections from the other points of view and incorporates them into its life, often in a lossy and non-optimal way. But that’s fine; it’s human after all.

All these human feelings are seen from the rational mind as shortcuts that are useful for the body to preserve itself. For instance, hunger is a great signal that prompts my brain to start brainstorming and planning on how to get food. These computations occur automatically at an instinctual level without requiring the expensive mental apparatus that comes from emulating the rational point of view from the lossy human hardware.

The rational point of view understands that these feelings exist because of evolutionary reasons. Brains that tend to implement these types of heuristics (which translate into the felt sense of hunger from a first-person point of view) lead to organisms that are more likely to survive hunger and, hence, have better reproductive success.

This also means that feelings make the human follow an agenda that is not necessarily aligned with the rational point of view. For hunger, the rational point of view and the feelings are on the same page. It’s cool to have an easy way to obtain the calories we need. However, for feelings like the blinding anger stemming from injustice, the warm feeling of belonging tied to specific beliefs, or a sexual attraction that makes you trust someone, these emotions are in the driver’s seat of human decision-making protocols while not being endorsed by the rational point of view.

From the rational mind’s perspective, these feelings have been optimized to work in humans’ ancestral environment and do not translate well to today’s modern world. Even if they did, they ultimately aim to make us have as much ~~babies~~ inclusive reproductive fitness (update after the rational point of view read the Selfish Gene: or) as possible! That’s not exactly the motivation we got from our contemplative exercise of looking at Earth from the stars.

So, an important mission of the rational mind is to figure out how to work with these misaligned feelings to successfully implement its agenda.

III

These three points of view come with a clear hierarchy. The point of view of the universe provides disembodied motivations that are agnostic to the situation I find myself in, while the rational point of view uses clear thinking to translate these motivations into situation-aware goals that align with human psychology. The human receives all of this and goes about living their life.

The points of view can communicate back and forth to access information that is inaccessible from their individual perspectives, but there is a clear understanding among the whole group that the level above is better placed to define a vision than the one below. However, for individual decisions, the level below might override the level above. For instance, the human might decide to trust their instincts because they know this tends to work, even if they cannot verbalize why.

Starting a bit more than a year ago, I felt that this hierarchy began to shift. I received enough evidence to think that there was something wrong with the way emotions were framed in this three-layer model.

The first evidence came from burnout. I witnessed firsthand the experience of supporting someone whose “body said no.” The career prospects they had talked about excitedly a month ago suddenly became unthinkable. The verbal part of them continued to formulate reasons why they should continue with this career, but another part was hitting a big red button. This other part no longer believed in the mission of the org they worked for or in the idea that it was a healthy work environment. It called out the verbal counterpart’s reasoning, and they quit their job.

After witnessing this from a third-person point of view, I also experienced a version of this for myself, though less dramatically. My work became detached from what I used to be excited about, but I had great reasons to continue working on what I was doing (if I listened to the rational and universal point of view). I felt unexcited about my work, my mental health declined, and (skipping a few steps in the story involving support from my partner and family) I decided to quit.

In retrospect, these were two great moves. The work environments were clearly bad fits in both cases, and quitting was the right option that should have happened earlier.

These events shattered my three-level system. I don’t know what was pushing the red button or what was making the body say no, but it was well-informed. It knew what work I found meaningful, as well as what my work environment could provide that the rational point of view could not see, tangled in a web of arguments. To fit my system, I should categorize this into the “feeling box.” However, it clearly didn’t fit the archaic, ill-adapted view of emotions I had developed so far. The hierarchy got reversed, and it was the turn of the rational point of view to attend a lecture from the emotional point of view; there was a lot to catch up on.

Despite the confusion, this refactoring was a blessing. I discovered that I had a clear-sighted, powerful force rooting for me that had been living within me all this time. It was something that didn’t need to put words to why something was wrong to call bullshit and cut my losses. How could I create a healthier relationship with this force? How can I even start to think about it? Should it be regarded as a subpart, a force, the source of emotions, or the emotions themselves? How could I listen to it outside of the spike of burnout?

Nowadays, I am close to feel I have integrated this shift into my self-model, in part due to a collection of great readings that I will list for curious readers at the end of this post.

One source to highlight is the booklet Enjoy Existing by Eric Lanigan. In simple language, the book introduces a listening and trusting stance towards emotions. It shows ways to make the different parts of ourselves sit at a table and discuss matters productively, instead of having them aggressively jump at the steering wheel and take a 180-degree turn every few months or years.

Its key examples focus on feelings of stress. The book describes them as messages that signify something matters to us. They come with a packaged tension, an energy we can tap into to take action once we listen to the messages they contain and start taking productive steps to resolve the tension.

My current view is that emotions are means of perceiving and processing my lived experience that do not express in words but most often in bodily sensations.

It takes practice to literally “be” in my body and listen to the sensations I feel from there. By default, and for most of my life until a few years ago, if you had asked me to give the most precise answer to “Where are you?” I would have answered that I was in my head, in a spot a few centimeters behind my eyes. Sensations coming from the rest of my body felt like they came from “far away” compared to my visual perception.

However, this perception of space and location is malleable; it can be softened, massaged, and broadened through meditation. It establishes enable you to listen to the non-verbal messages our emotions have to share before they escalate and scream so loudly that you have to stop everything you do to attend to them.

Emotions’ ways of knowing is fluid, broad, bottom-up, and nebulous compared to the solid, deep, top-down, and crisp ways of knowing that come from the verbal/rational part. Both modes are important to cultivate, but even more important is to find bridges between them without forcing a clear hierarchy.

VII