Guest
The role of emotions in our life. Emotions and what lies underneath them meaning positive and negative response reaction to things happening around us - is a key mechanism that allows us to pivot and make decisions. However, us being animals of higher order we also have a need to develop and engage with life with our cognitive abilities - that is draw parallels, connect events and phenomena into groups and categories, and also general rules and principles of reality. Doing that alone without relying upon culture is impossible that’s the role of upbringing and education is hard to overstate. In our current world and its culture however emotional responses are encouraged much more and it does make sense. So an average person during his or her life doesn’t train and develop such abilities as impartial assessment, profound unbiased empathy, the skill of keeping emotions and control, arguing when and in what amount one should use them to keep relationship stable, productive and successful. All of that requires years of training, motivation and determination to follow such a cognitive path which nowadays has been utterly devalued and perceived as boring, nerdy and as one that will fail to let you achieve much success. Instead, what today’s culture promotes and values the most is personal enrichment and survival in a world that is perceived hostile where everybody is out there alone by themselves. And this view is heavily supported and even stems from the socio-economic system of capitalism where selfishness became the unofficial main virtue. In such circumstances it’s inevitable and it’s only reasonable that the majority of people will neglect developing their cognition, especially by having a need to so themselves as self-learning, because most of the education provided to us in schools and universities is about following the rules, conformity and cramming some facts along the way. Thus, it becomes only natural for people to conserve an already overused energy and switch to predominantly emotional way of living, reasoning and approaching the world. So people get to feel that it’s much easier to just follow along this or that positively or negatively charged emotional state that will help to make it through a hard day or even shutdown thinking and feeling entirely and just sit at your job with mostly blank mind on the surface of which one can notice from time to time fleeting thoughts. In such a world it then becomes evident that it is hard to rely on other peoples’ judgement if they haven’t spent much time improving their understanding of the world around them, relying instead mostly on what is given to them by public opinion and government’s propaganda. Thus one can also see that the premise of democracy doesn’t really function where opinion of the majority is the main foundation of law but that opinion being shallow and ignorant. So one might think that developing cognitive abilities and advancing understanding of the reality doesn’t seem to worth it, is futile and unnecessary in the world where any information is readily available. Such skills however help us navigate in world easier, being able to anticipate events in our life, controlling our mind and emotions, doing less mistakes and providing more contribution to our society which then returns with certain rewards. So while in short term we get to experience more stress and strain ourselves more, but in the long run broad and profound understanding of the world makes life clearer and more predictable.
