Perceiving emotion clearly: does it happen to us or is it us happening?

 

My team at work has been told that the age of working from home is over and that we must now work our full working weeks in the office. The company’s owners believe that anyone working from home is not working, despite the evidence of the last two years. They do take most of their work meetings from home themselves, despite living less than five minutes from the central London office.

Our managers tried to reconcile us to this announcement by telling us that we would soon become accustomed to the daily grind of commuting. This folksy wisdom struck a bum note with us, as I discussed afterwards with one of my colleagues.

One way in which it was such a poor argument was that it didn’t address the problem: it simply promised us happiness (or rather, that the unhappiness would fade). Like opium, religion or wild-eyed, overenthusiastic, reality-denying self-help mantras this ‘advice’ tried to address our emotions directly.

In our conversation afterwards we ended up discussing this, and I confided to my colleague that I don’t drink, eat or game to make myself feel better. I do these things because they feel good, but not because there is some sort of immediate deficit to make good. I don’t do things to correct a mood. I think that that way of approaching life is fundamentally flawed.

 

A few days later I ended up in a(nother) argument with my sister, who was angry when I mentioned that the prospect of commuting to the office was looming over me. She thought that I was focussing on the negative, making a mountain out of a molehill and wallowing in misery. I mentioned my boss’ ‘advice’, and she thought it reasonable. We are creatures of emotion, she seemed to think, and we shouldn’t ignore or distance ourselves from that. If the direct emotional impact will be small, because we adapt to situations we find ourselves in, why would I ignore that fact and 'choose' to be upset about something that will not end up displeasing me that much?

Amongst the multitude of answers I wanted to give but couldn’t because I didn’t want to anger her even more is to refer this real-life situation back to the concept of higher values. Is mere hedonism all there is in life, or are there other, more important things? Because the truth is that working from home is far more convenient for all of my team, barely hinders productivity at all (and if only for the part of the week, not at all) and that coming to the office is merely the owners’ unjustifiable whim. If humans adapt, why can he not adapt to the truth and find that actually having us work from home is not so bad? Truth matters to me. Things are right or wrong, and things that are wrong rankle. This doesn’t stop: I don’t just forget that things are not true. I do have other things to do in life apart from ponder all the untruths out there, but every so often I’m forced to face one, or it pops into my mind. And the more there are, the more this happens.

Should I abandon the core part of my being and chase the latest pleasure, never caring about truth or justice? Should I give up on fulfilment, the peak of Maslow’s pyramid of needs, and accept that drugs, or their equivalent, are fine? Is it nobler to ignore the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, or to take arms against a sea of troubles and suffer them? Am I homo sapiens, or homo sentiens?

Apparently there is a therapist who persuaded my sister to abandon the idea that emotions are outside influences and to embrace her emotions as a core part of her being. I’m at a bit of a loss to understand what this really means, but it seems to be in opposition to what I think is true:

Emotions come with experiences. When I see the road outside, I see grey tarmac and paving stones. When I look at a pretty face it feels good. When I stop looking at the road I no longer see grey, although I can remember the experience and the view. When I stop looking at a pretty face the good feeling stops, although I can remember the experience and the view. When I remember my mother, I can remember great times, but it is always tainted by the immeasurable sorrow that she is dead. When I’m not remembering my mother, that sorrow fades away again.

If someone were to tell me not to see grey when I look outside, we would all laugh. The grey is there, even though lush green valleys are a better view. The same applies to the emotional impact of being commanded not to work from home. It is a bad thing, even though perceiving good things is more fun. I am devoted to seeing the truth in such things; it matters to me. It makes me fulfilled beyond the everyday hedonism of spirits, chocolate and computer games.

Where other people adapt to good and bad fortune, I remember whether things are good or bad. It is something I am proud of, and aspire to maintain. I like seeing the truth of things. I work at it. Tell me about cognitive biases and every time you will find that I have been overcoming such errors all my life. I am sadly familiar with them; my commitment to truth is not a bias to be abandoned in favour of wallowing in hedonism and accepting my animal nature. I avoid immediately-pleasing emotional bias in favour of fulfilment.

Other people in my situation might have other priorities: they might care about the fact that my company’s owners work from home themselves, and own far more than the brightest poor person could hope to earn in a lifetime. They might care about the liberty of choosing for themselves how to live parts of their life irrelevant to the work they have promised to perform. They might care about the extreme lack of goodwill that demands things from workers despite their obvious objections. All these points carry weight with me.

This is how we should think. The world would be better if people didn’t adapt to unpleasantness; if we carried the knowledge of wrongness inside us. Instead evil or thoughtless people continue to commit unpleasantness and outright crime unchallenged, and the rest of us muddle along, adapting to a world that other people shape. And we therefore indirectly shape it too, implicitly supporting anything that is wrong in life.

 

Death is horrific, but we just accept it until we, too, die. Climate change will destroy the world as we know it, but we just muddle along. Inequality is a disgrace, but we survive and ignore it. People who speak up are shouted down for disturbing our frail peace of mind: something that campaigners about sexism, racism and similar injustices have railed against for decades. Keep quiet and accept a problem, or speak up and be called a problem for being so negative and nasty.

My personal issues are hardly on the same scale (although they are mini-examples of wider issues in the world), but the principle is the same. If you hate someone in your life talking openly about their problems and you’d rather life were just a happy sequence of fun times, then you might be a hedonist. That’s your choice, although many people seduced by hedonism later find that they’re not as happy as they hoped. But other people don’t have to be hedonists too. Fulfilment comes from confronting what is wrong in life, no matter how powerful it is.

It's better to fight tyranny. Stand up and be counted.

The mind is its own place and in it self can make a Heav’n of Hell, a Hell of Heav’n. It doesn’t matter if the outside world is awful, as long as you are content with yourself. And the way to be content with yourself is not to pretend that bad things are not bad: it is to acknowledge them, to see them for what they really are. There is no virtue in delusion. You will fail: you will get things wrong and make mistakes. We are all only human, and mistakes are inevitable. We must forgive our mistakes, but only if we’re actively trying our best not to make them.

Commuting is awful and will always be so. This does not mean that life is not worth living. It is because I have not given up on life that I confront and acknowledge unpleasantness. Some day, when I’m old and tired, I’ll forget the problems of the world. When I chase emotion instead of reality you know I've ceased to care. My spirit will be gone, and soon after, my body. But that day isn’t here yet.

No regrets... about having regrets

 

A person with no regrets must have had no alternative options in life. It’s natural to regret not taking a different path, so having no regrets must mean either that you were too blinkered to see all the myriad possibilities of life, or that you were too bad to have any genuine alternatives to what you did.

When I visit a new city on holiday, I might regret giving in to the pain in my feet and not walking along an extra few scenic metres. When I think about my career, I regret all the other jobs I might have done that might have gone somewhere: staying in academia, somehow managing to escape the manager I had as a trainee accountant and working for someone decent in the same organisation, holding out for a more appropriate first post-qualified job etc…. When I think about my social life, I regret not staying in touch with more friends; I regret being oblivious to romantic overtures from nice women and not being vicious enough to cut nasty ones from my life.

Having no regrets means having lived the perfect life, with no mistakes, misfortunes or alternatives: it means being deluded, because such perfection is vanishingly unlikely. You might argue whether wistfulness over misfortune is really ‘regret’ or instead some similar emotion, but the point remains the same, no matter how much you try to trim its scope: if you think that every mistake was for the best, because good came of it, you are making a logical error. Good can come of making no mistakes. For every good event that happened after something bad, I can imagine a world in which the good thing happened even when the bad one didn’t.

This is not the best of all possible worlds: choosing to think that it is means deliberately avoiding its, and our, failings, and we cannot improve something whose flaws we do not acknowledge.

 

The question of regret touches on a wider one: of the conflict between happiness and truth. Is happiness a virtue, and is the purpose of life to be happy?

These two questions underpin a whole world of self-help and popular culture, as well as our life choices. They are easily dismissed as impractical philosophising, but they are important. Many people think that they know how to live life, and a philosopher pondering semi-abstract questions is irrelevant to real life. But society’s massive appetite for self-help books and mid-life crises shows that people do realise these questions’ importance.

If you could plug yourself into a matrix and live a near-perfect life, generated just for you by the computer system feeding experiences directly into your brain, would you? You could be wealthy, powerful and attractive until your real body withers away. It’s an ancient idea: before we had computers, philosophers pondered the same question phrased as the possibility of a magical demon casting an illusion on someone.

Many people would do so, but many of us wouldn’t. For me, some essential aspect of life would be lost: it would no longer be meaningful. I might as well buy some opium and get high every day, as some people do.

And who is it who takes drugs every day? It’s the poor and lost. We know that partly this is because of local availability and perhaps culture. But we also know it’s due to desperation. Give rats in cages opium-laced water and normal water to choose from and they become addicts rapidly. Give rats in cages with wheels, dens, tunnels and space the same choice of water and they choose a lot less opium.

Give American soldiers in Vietnam opium and then bring them home, and the ones with good families and lives to return to forget the drug. The ones with poor lives, made worse by war memories, are far more likely to sink into further drug use.

The delusion of ‘no regrets’ is another opiate, like religions which promise eternal, pleasant life after the misery of the current one. ‘No regrets’ is yet another way we can achieve happiness by divorcing ourselves from reality. It is better camouflaged: it might seem innocent and uplifting, but that makes it more insidious than a physical drug.

We should not blame the poor and suffering for their need for something to make them feel better. The eternal pain of misery; the desperation and longing for something more from life can drive even strong minds to make mistakes (such as falling for conmen and voting to leave the EU, or giving one’s savings to scammers). But we also should not offer falsehoods as comfort. Almost everyone would be disgusted if we offered opium to the poor in place of trying to improve their lives, even if we changed the name to, say, soma. Funnily enough, soma is a real painkiller despite the name being invented in a dystopian book.

Yet we offer religion and self-help quite happily. ‘No regrets’ is a message I am sure you can find on popular algorithm-driven attention farms, alongside similar injunctions to be happy, ignore the negative and focus on what positives you can.

Although these messages have been patently absurd for the 50 years (I guess) they’ve been sold, there is finally a bit of a backlash, as researchers find that people are no happier from following these happiness-inducing methods.

This is because people need more from life. We need meaning. We all have slightly different ideas of what is meaningful: good relationships, family, making a difference… Some people even genuinely get meaning from material success, although most people pursuing it are just shallow and thoughtless and have mid- or late-life crises when they realise that they are unfulfilled. Achieving these things in a simulation strips them of their value: they become mere hedonism; indulgent dreams that give pleasure only in the moment.

I have known philosophers who have questioned why this is: who have asked whether an achievement that required struggle and skill is any less valuable if the results are only simulated. After all, the skill and struggle were still real. Others have asked why meaning is so important: they support the idea of hedonism as the only purpose in life. We can put these questions to one side: self-help books and trite aphorisms don’t teach unbridled hedonism or try to persuade us to adopt it, and most people do want something more from life.

 

We know that pleasure is not the only end in life. It’s an essential feature of a good life: I’m not an ascetic trying to persuade everyone to wear a hair shirt and flagellate themselves. Nor do I agree with the majority of people who think that sex for pleasure is a sin or that gorging oneself on chocolate and alcohol is depraved. That would be grossly hypocritical, given my typical evening.

These pleasures are necessary fun in life, but not sufficient to make a life good. There are ‘higher’ things, such as truth, beauty, justice, liberty, equality, fraternity, knowledge and so on. Each person’s mileage will vary on these: many people have little regard for truth even though it’s foundational for any of the rest. On the opposite end of the scale, I don’t regard beauty as a higher virtue than any fleeting pleasure, whereas many artists have revered it as the highest goal in life, even equating truth and beauty.

 

‘No regrets’ tells you to forget sadness: to believe that all is for the best in this, the best of all possible worlds. It’s absurd. Even Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg ought to have regrets and they have been immensely fortunate. ‘No regrets’ tells you never to ponder what might be, but instead to accept what is. It tells you to kill your dreams and forget your principles, to accept what you’re given and submit to your fate. You can’t help but submit physically, in the sense that no-one is a magician who can change reality with a snap of the fingers, but do you want to submit mentally too: to subdue your spirit when it starts to awaken?

You choose: try your best to turn yourself into a slave of circumstance with no regrets, or assert your freedom of spirit, and acknowledge all the alternatives, for better and worse?