Tags: Observations, Long, Psychological, Analysis, Self-improvement, Problem-Solving, Diagrams, New Concepts
Every line, color, shape, and motion we see and experience in this world invoke emotions. However, these emotions aren't dramatic enough to become noticeable or influential in our decisions, hence, I will call them "Microemotions".
When these Microemotions accumulate, they form the emotional atmosphere, the mood of the environment. For example, the forest feels tranquil, natural, and relaxing. The home feels safe, normal, and simple.
This emotional atmosphere is formed by the sum and arrangement of these Microemotions.
A human being is more of an emotional being than a rational one, where rational thoughts only appear at the conscious level, while emotions serve to influence them at all levels of consciousness, including their subconscious and unconscious.
Therefore, at any, given time and place, a person is bound to experience a *multitude of emotions, with some more noticeable than others.
For easier identification, we have identified our emotions as either positive or negative. Most people believe that positive emotions should take priority while we should just ignore our negative emotions and not pay any attention to them so they can disappear.
That's true, for most of the time at least. What we don't know is that acceptance and understanding of negative emotions can help us understand ourselves more, identify our current needs, and even potentially resolve our problems.
The important point is that we don't have to feel these negative emotions all the time, but we can give them a separate timeslot for us to know more about ourselves and address the needs we didn't know we had.
While all individual desires are the same in the sense that it doesn't care about following society's standards, most people subjectively categorize their desires between rational and irrational desires.
These are our subconscious and unconscious desires that we believe to be detrimental to our standing in society and might affect our mental health. Thus, we always try to hide and suppress these desires.
However, they still have a major influence on our decisions, and we can't fully compromise with our irrational desires.
We may be able to hold them for a few days or weeks, or pretend that we don't have them at all, but it's not possible to completely remove them since they are part of our genes.
With enough acceptance and understanding, we can turn an irrational desire into a rational one, transforming them into something more socially acceptable and effective.
These are our conscious desires, the ones that we usually say with the word "I want" together with our friends. What differentiates them from irrational desires is that they are more socially acceptable and made with conscious thought.
The most common examples are:
These rational desires play the most important role in our decision-making process, similar to the protagonist that sets on an adventure to achieve their goals, while the irrational desires are like neutral objects in the adventure that can either help or slow them from reaching their goals.
Both of these desires provide internal motivation and powerful emotions for the person to act on them and spring into action, pushing their life forward.
They also sometimes conflict with each other, causing hesitation and indecision. That's why it's important to know what exactly we want, the things we can risk, and how much we are willing to compromise before making a decision.
With the new observations and theories above, we can form a clearer decision-making model based entirely on emotions but still very precise that we can even place it into a graph and predict what would be a person's decision for a particular situation.
So imagine this...
The rational desires are our goal, something we want to achieve, something we'll combine our willpower and emotions to reach.
Then there's the irrational desires, something we might tend to do unconsciously and impulsively.
Finally, there's our Microemotions that serves as our emotional environment which is completely outside of our control and contains hundreds of mini-factors that might slightly or significantly affect our decision.
All these three are either emotions or produce emotions necessary for action. With the number of emotions and desires a person can have in a single moment, internal conflict within them is almost unavoidable.
In this war of emotions, the state of the winner would become the final decision. The ones who win aren't necessarily those who are right, but those emotions which are more powerful than others.
However, there is something here within our control, the fourth factor — our own willpower.
Despite how tiny or weak our willpower is, it can greatly affect the outcome of the war depending on which desire it would support. If our support is divided and we remain undecided, then it won't be able to do anything.
Let's simulate a typical situation *for an average student and see how this model works *in practice.
Rational desires:
I want to pass the exams, get high grades
Irrational desires:
Play games & watch interesting videos
Emotional atmosphere:
Quiet room with a phone on hand
Untrained natural reaction:
Play games and watch interesting videos until the last minute to study for exams
Best decisive reaction:
Think for a while and decide to make studying a priority (using willpower), then use the phone to research and study for a while, promising oneself to play games and watch interesting videos after a few hours of studying, then letting go of the phone while studying using notebooks and books.
As you can see, the untrained natural reactions always gravitates to the easy, convenient, and comfortable path where irrational desires are given priority over rational desires. If we think, do, and decide nothing, our reactions default to the untrained natural reaction.
The resulting best decisive reaction can only be achieved through making a proper compromise with the irrational desires while still pursuing the rational desires. It can mean offering the irrational desires as reward, then the opposite of it as punishment", just so we can *focus on satisfying our rational desires.
It is also possible to perceive rational desires as the goal and target to achieve, while irrational desires as the limitations, compromises, and imperfections that should be satisfied along the way.
Thus, it's normal if we keep falling short of our ideal goals and targets because we're trying our best to compromise with our irrational desires.
However, we can't always keep falling short and do the same thing every day. We can't always choose to do the untrained natural reactions either. Doing so would effectively stop us from growing.
It's important that we learn to normalize and turn our supposedly irrational desires into a rational ones along the way as we seek the path of progress.
A life that looks too comfortable on the outside is extremely uncomfortable on the inside. You'll be riddled with so many fears, questions, and worries which you would never hope to confront or understand.
True comfort only happens if we trained ourselves to be completely comfortable in the face of the uncomfortable.
There are seven most uncomfortable emotions in life that most people would rather avoid facing, but those who managed to confront and overcome them would be surely rewarded with a wonderful experience.
These uncomfortable emotions creep within the back of the person, and sometimes hide themselves in our shadows, but they are most usually seen blocking and narrowing our vision, preventing us from seeing hope and happiness.
The feeling of getting closer and closer to death, without being able to live a happy or fulfilling life. This feeling creeps up from our shadows into our emotions whenever we feel that we are alone and have nothing good to do.
People usually describe this as a cold, empty, and shadowy feeling, as if there's a hand made of ice holding their heart, and a shadow monster absorbing their soul.
Being idle or stagnant for long periods of time always triggers the feeling of existential dread, making the person think something along the lines of "I'm already at this point in my life, but I'm still like this, my future is nothing except death".
This feeling usually surfaces whenever we are tired or lazy, and the best way to deal with it is to either have a pleasant conversation with a friend or by doing some meaningful work.
The uncomfortable feelings related to our perception of time.
Overwhelmed The feeling of being overwhelmed is when you felt that you will never have enough time to complete everything you have to do. That you have so many things you want to do but no time in your schedule to do them.
Impatience The feeling where time feels so long as if you're wasting your time doing something so annoying when you could be doing something great or exciting. This feels like an itchy feeling that you could never scratch.
Boredom The feeling that you have too little time and nothing exciting nor interesting to do at the moment. Everything feels grey and empty, devoid of any meaning or purpose. Time seems to slow down as you float in the center of nothingness.
An uncomfortable feeling that happens whenever you are about to show or approach someone with seemingly higher status, making you feel as if your existence doesn't have any value or purpose compared to them, like an ant trying to comprehend an elephant.
This is the most common uncomfortable feeling that everyone feels at some point in their lives. Sometimes called "anxious sensations", it makes a person feel an increase in body temperature and weight, their stomachs turning upside down, and nervous shaking in their arms.
It's not uncommon to see someone experiencing this feeling changing their voice and stuttering as they try to find the way out of the mental labyrinth they have trapped themselves in.
It's important that those who experience this feeling change their focus to their environment, their goals, and the other person. Heightened external awareness is the most crucial for dealing with this illusion.
This dreadful feeling of Isolation makes you feel as if you have no place in this world, that the world doesn't care about you nor needs you, as if you're completely unwanted and needed.
It feels as if you're all alone in this vast universe, as if no one would be able to notice you or understand you, and you'll never be able to truly connect with anyone else.
This feeling drains all the social energy out of a person, making it like a dark sticky mud that slowly drowns the person over time, making it more difficult to escape the longer they remain alone and isolated.
It is important to understand that this feeling is simply an illusion resulting from the lack of social interaction in a person's life and not a truly realistic feeling in the sense of the world.
In the words of Wolfgang Grimmer from Monster anime — "you are born because you are wanted". It is in our best interest to believe that someone out there, is patiently waiting for us to come into their life, that we could still be useful even as a meat shield.
Effects of Isolation
An isolated person would most likely have tunnel vision that prevents them from looking outwardly in their environment where they'll only see and feel themselves.
In this case, their lack of awareness of the environment would cause their mental state to deteriorate even more and affect how they perceive their environment.
Instead of seeing the world as "road forward, grass on the right, trees on left", they'll be able to see it as "darkness in front, pain on right, humiliation on left, suffering at the back", which would only serve to worsen their situation.
The same effects remain true when someone is interacting or communicating with an isolated person — the isolated person would always attempt to distort reality by painting it and everyone on it with a darker shade, hampering attempts at counseling and rehabilitation.
Therefore, it would be more effective if the listener manages to connect and empathize with them first before pulling them out of their distorted sense of reality.
One of the most terrifyingly uncomfortable feelings to ever exist, Despair is the complete utter loss of hope, conviction, and motivation that makes people go forward. It makes people temporarily and completely forget their reasons for living and existence, experiencing a life hundreds of times worse than death.
This usually happens whenever they experience a seemingly neverending consecutive streak of failures, rejection, and suffering that wounds their very soul.
Despair could also be a consequence of the final stage of burnout, where you have tried everything again and again, yet nothing still seems to work out.
This uncomfortable feeling almost always leads to AOMD, depression, or mental breakdown, in which the person succumbs to the darkness and makes them experience other uncomfortable feelings simultaneously.
There's no immediate treatment for Despair, but it's important to reach out for professional help when this happens. Even the tiniest help and support of friends and family are invaluable.
In the end, it's still up to the person to decide whether they want to continue moving forward or not.
No matter how much we try to pretend to be "fine", we are emotional beings who are bound to experience a range of emotions at any given moment in time. Every external stimulus received by our senses is filtered and then activates the corresponding emotion in our brain. These tiny emotions are what we call Microemotions.
Our current emotions then, are the sum of all these microemotions we receive from the perceived information of our environment.
Consecutively, these emotions change the way we see the world, allowing us to perceive differently and feel different emotions from the same situation and environment.
Human desires are heavily connected with emotions, as the emotions fuel the desires and vice versa. We automatically categorize our desires into two: rational and irrational desires.
Plotting all this information into a line graph, our rational desires is like the goals we want to reach, so it's like the highest bar on the graph. Our irrational desires are something that may counter or complement our rational desires, while our microemotions are like the background of the graph, the emotional atmosphere and uncertain factor that can affect our decision.
(For those who are asking where the line in this line graph is, you'll be the line who will decide under the wave currents of your irrational desires and the blowing wind of your microemotions. Yeah I know how weird this line graph is lol.)
The best way to make decisions then, is to reach our rational desires in a way that doesn't go against the waves of irrational desires, nor goes against the wind of our microemotions, but using the waves and the wind to your advantage in reaching your destination, just like how a good sailor always does.
All emotions, including the most uncomfortable ones, are a necessary part of life. Together, they direct the person to keep moving forward on the right path and avoid becoming completely absorbed in the darkness.
"Writing this article relying only on my experiences and observations was extremely difficult. Technical research writers would have spammed hundreds of numbers, jargons, and names already, but I won't do any of that. I believe in the power of original ideas that came through personal experience, the ideas of the common folk that has always been underestimated, yet once laid the groundwork for all the technological advancements we have now."
(Haha actually, I'm just lazy to research stuff for the sake of extra "shine". It's like adding more complex designs to make it look good on the outside, but doesn't do much on the inside.)
"Emotions make the man. Even the coldest and most evil people in the world feel emotions, although it's on the extreme sides of the emotional spectrum."
"Animals and plants feel emotions too, but not once they have thought 'Look at me, I am feeling this emotion', for only humans have been given the power to ignore their own emotions in favor of their rational desires."