Logic over Emotions !!

This was a very sentimental article which I read in WSJ .

A female of the age of 96, is very vulnerable and fragile, but she
still insists on living in a house which she and her husband had build
decades back. You tend to think, it doesn’t make sense for a person of
this age, who tends to have memory loss, who cannot walk properly and
who is really so fragile, that she should live in this house, even if
it means, living alone, than to move with her son, who lives some 6
hours from her place. But that’s where the life takes a turn.

We sometimes, ignore or crush the feeling over logic. We tend to follow
something which seems logically correct, scientifically appropriate and
economically viable. We feel that emotions, feeling make people weak,
they have no place when making decision, they looks good only in the
soap operas.

But are emotions so useless or cheep. No, emotions are the most
important part of any living creature, be it human or other species.
Emotions are stored as an integral portion in our memory and we make
decision based both on logic as well as emotions.

So, coming back to the article, her son had make numerous desperate
attempts to bring her to his place, but all in vain. She had lived a
long life in this place, she knows and remember each and everything ,
every stone, every piece of the furniture and the memories of the
house, her husband , her children, her friends. She has a huge world
inside this, a world which contains almost 70 years of her life.

Does she really care if she falls from the stairs and probably die? No,
she has lived her life with great zeal and doesn’t want to end it with
some pity. She would be happy to die in these memories than in some
nursing house, among unknowns.

This is the power of emotion and feeling. You live a social life and
the emotions are integral part of it. Then why do we hate it so much?
Partly because they have been derided by our TV serials, and more s by
the fact that we do not have a logical conclusion to these emotions,
they make our decision-making fragile, they make us look like an
un-confident person.

I feel, we have, over decades, started to suppress our emotions and just show our creative and logical face to the world and that’s why , we watch so many movies, music, because these movies/music help us cry and shout and scream which we are not able to do in our so-called normal life.

I guess, we have started having a pent up frustration against this world and everyone around us. We tend to look at the most of the negative things, we make very feeble human bonding, which can be broken at the click of the fingers. Its not that we do not talk much, in fact we talk far more than our forefathers, but we do not share feelings and emotions, and its more prominent in the males, because emotions are mostly attributed to the females. The males are expected to be strong at heart and brain and somehow, it comes to holding your emotions to show a strong front.


But , with this career centric life, and desire to do something big, its encouraging more and more people (men and women) to suppress their feelings and show a creative and logical outlook. But it is leading rise to more commotion in our social life, where also, we tend to follow the same dictum as we do in the corporate world.

Its time to do something, to start expressing our self better, and by expressing I mean the quality feelings and emotions, not the melodrama queen types. Else, we will become a closer semblance to the robots, both of them running on some rules and logics like an AI system and the word emotion will be wiped out from our dictionary.

Mid Life Crisis !!

A few days back, I was talking to a friend of mine and she told me a funny incidence.A friend of her, aged around 35 ,who is a software engineer, working in a pretty good company , here in California, earning big bucks, all of a sudden quit the job. The reason - he wants to become an actor.

This might sound quite funny, but many of us have, what is called "Mid life crisis". When we are young and energetic, we can do anything in the world, to get name, fame and money. But when we get into our middle life, we start to realize the emptiness, we loose the affinity to money, we start missing something, we feel what wanted to achieve has not been achieved. We feel like we directed our energy and attention towards wrong direction. And we feel scared, because, we cannot get that life back and making changes is not an easy idea, socially and economically.

Today, as we stand, how many of us are doing what we wanted to do? I guess hardly any. Most of us want to change job, change industry, change things around us. Now, we want to change, but that doesn’t mean, we know what we want to change, we just want to change. So most of us keep changing, thinking that we are going towards our goal in life, whereas, we are mere circling around some parameters like name, fame and money and that keep continuing for year’s altogether.

But, on a practical scale, its not possible for a person to start with something which they always wanted to do, but we all should, take some time out of our hectic life and think what we want in life and see how close we can get to it even when we are doing our everyday activities, so that we don’t end up opening our eyes one fine day and get scared.

I tried to think, what I would love to do when I get settled with my career and social life, I would try my hands on writing. I love to write. I might even try something on creativity and psychology; I like to talk about these topics.

So tell me, you people, thinking deeply and properly, what do you think, you want to do in your mid life?

-ATG