Is It OK To Live From One High To Another?

Without any doubt, it is settled in almost every stream of study and every school of thought, that the reward of any and every human effort comes out in the form of emotional highs, the degree of which depends upon the scale of effort being put into action.

We might start something out of reason, but it always ends in rewarding our emotions and feelings. 

The inescapability of man from getting high on emotions and hormones is inevitable.

Getting high on hormones like dopamine and serotonin that eventually end up in emotions and feelings is not a bad thing, per se.

Every human being from the start of time is on the run to maintain relationships, eat well, sleep in a fluffy bed and live a peaceful life.

All this for what?

Man can sleep on bare rock as animals do.

Then why struggle so hard?

Looking deep beneath the superficial surface, it all boils down to one and only one thing. And that one thing is to feel good at the end of the day.

Alex Honnold free climbed the El Capitan in Yosemite National Park without any ropes to get that dopamine hit.

It's the emotional high that druggies chase all their lives.

Despite being a deep thinker, philosopher, and a good man by heart, Marcus Aurelius approached ruling the Roman Empire through the lens of an imperialist. 

The underlying principle of human growth and evolution relies upon the very facet of human life that depends on feelings.

Man lives for emotions. Reason is a tool to achieve the desired emotions by showing us the way forward.

Despite reason being dead & cold and emotions being alive and warm, we still would have to rely upon reason for its disciplined, neat, and clean nature. For reason keeps in order. Emotions are messy.

Upon personal reflection, I've come to the conclusion that putting emotions in the end and assigning a major portion of the process to reason is quite a wise decision.

Think of it this way. Make two clear and distinct personas of your own self. Call your one persona the reason and another the feelings.

Let the reason take and pursue decisions. It would be dry but it would be worth it. Once the reason has worked out and completed what it had initiated, let the feelings reward you for what you have done.

Messing up with this chronological order and distorting the natural rhythm could cause much more damage than imagined. Letting emotions and feelings take over the driving seat would be one of the most foolish decisions one could ever make.

Unfortunately enough, our current day world of easy tech and social media is injecting this very notion to 'let emotions take over' is eating away the strength of the fabric of human society.

Letting emotions decide rather than reason is the same as letting a 7-year-old kid drive the car while adult parents are sitting in the back seat and just watching it drive the car into God knows where.

Mark Manson in his New York Times bestseller, The Subtle Art Of Not Giving A F*ck, writes and I quote:

Pleasure is a false god. It's the most superficial form of happiness, therefore the easiest to obtain and the quickest to go away.

Pegging the concept of pleasure and highs back to the chemistry of the brain, it could easily be concluded that highs are just a matter of time. A high is nothing more than a hormonal shot from the brain and showered upon the body to feel really good just for a moment.

The avoidance of hormones and emotions is a completely absurd execution of resources. What one can do instead is mold them to the benefit of oneself. 

When you can't avoid it, you regulate it.

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