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heroic is the ability to conjure hope where there is none. To strike a match to light up the void. To show us a possibility
have tried to live my life such that in the hour of my death I would feel joy rather than fear.”
No, the opposite of happiness is hopelessness, an endless gray horizon of resignation and indifference.
Hope doesn’t care about the problems that have already been solved. Hope cares only about the problems that still need to be solved. Because the better the world gets, the more we have to lose. And the more we have to lose, the less we feel we have to hope for.
To build and maintain hope, we need three
things: a sense of control, a belief in the value of somethin...
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is undisciplined, unruly, or malicious, it’s because he lacks the ability to subjugate his feelings, that he is weak-willed or just plain fucked up.
The Classic Assumption sees passion and emotion as flaws, errors within the human psyche that must be overcome and fixed within the self.
we require more than willpower to achieve self-control. It turns out that our emotions are instrumental
You Have Two Brains, and They’re Really Bad at Talking to Each Other
When we think of ourselves and our decision making, we generally assume that the Thinking Brain is driving our Consciousness Car and the Feeling Brain is sitting in the passenger seat shouting out where it wants to go.
The Feeling Brain drives our Consciousness Car because, ultimately, we are moved to action only by emotion.
Emotion inspires action, and action inspires
emotion. The two are inseparable.
This leads to the simplest and most obvious answer to the timeless question, why don’t we do things we know we should ...
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Thinking Brain is often correcting the Feeling Brain, showing it where it took a wrong turn.
people are always mistaking what feels good for what is good.
Thinking Brain over the Feeling Brain, the championing of reason over emotion, duty over desire.
that’s the only language the Feeling Brain really understands:
The Feeling Brain won’t respond with words. No, the Feeling Brain is too quick for words. Instead, it will respond with feelings.
they can breathe, because the more they breathe, the weaker their grip is on the steering wheel of
Maybe remind the Feeling Brain how good it feels to have exercised, how great it will feel to look good in a bathing suit this summer, how much you respect yourself when you’ve followed through on your goals, how happy you are when you live by your values, when you act as an example to the ones you love.
only a little bit! Remember:
feelings never last.
They will have to ask themselves, what if my Feeling Brain
Thinking Brain isn’t aligned with the Feeling Brain, people feel powerless, and the world around them begins to feel hopeless.
The only way you consistently nail that illusion is by consistently communicating and aligning the brains around the same values.
Create an environment that can bring about the Feeling Brain’s best impulses and intuition, rather than its worst. Accept and work with, rather than against, whatever the Feeling Brain
A kind of moral gap opens between us: the sense that one of us is inherently righteous, and the other is an inferior piece of shit.6
every action demands an equal and opposite emotional reaction. This is Newton’s First
Newton’s Second Law of Emotion: How we come to value everything in life relative to ourselves is the sum of our emotions over time.
because we are at the center of everything we experience.
Our values aren’t just collections of feelings. Our values are stories.
Our identities snowball through our lives, accumulating more and more values and meaning as they tumble along.
that experience creates a new narrative and new value in your mind. You, you decide, have anger issues . . . especially around your mother. And now that becomes an inherent part of your identity.
And the worst thing is, the longer we’ve held onto these narratives, the less aware we are that we have them. They become the background noise of our thoughts, the interior decoration of our minds.
Wait, did he punch me because I’m an awful person; or is he the awful person?
If it’s not, then it means that nothing is changing.
What if you didn’t have to prove anything to the people in your life for them to like you? What if people’s unavailability has more to do with them than it does with you?
Other times, you can just tell your Feeling Brain stories that might or might not be true but
that feel...
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Enemy? Where? But figuratively, emotionally, it is incredibly powerful.
Without these narratives—without developing a clear vision of the future we desire, of the values we want to adopt, of the identities we want to shed or step into—we are forever doomed to repeat the failures of our past pain.
Our values align,
and our cause becomes one!
Remember that in order to feel hope, we need to feel there’s a better future out there (values); we need to feel as though we are capable of getting to that better future (self-control); and we need to find other people who share our values and support our efforts (community).
values cannot be changed through reason, only through experience.
Today, appealing to the hopeless is easier than ever before. All you need is a social media account: start posting extreme and crazy shit, and let the algorithm do the rest.
Evidence belongs to the Thinking Brain,
values are decided by the Feeling Brain.
