Irrationality vs Emotion
During guard duties I try as much as possible to chat with my partner while we make our rounds, if not for entertainment it is to ensure that I remain awake enough to finish my rounds without sleeping let alone be awake enough if I were to encounter an intruder. Me usually being chatty in nature, I tend to begin a monologue of nonsense as I slowly digress from my original topic to the point that there no longer seems to be a relevant relation between the first point and my last point of my monologue at the end of my duty. However I did mention one point within my monologue that I deem worthy of writing down on my blog, something that until this moment I find trouble in resolving.
I like to view myself as a person of reason, it meaning that everything I do has an entirely logical reason behind what I am doing. What I did find recently is that logic and emotion tend to clash quite a bit. For example, showing signs of affection to a younger sibling in terms of buying presents has no rational meaning. It is unlikely that you stand to get anything tangible in return, and thus you are spending resources earned by yourself only to invest in something with no returns. Of course, you may expect receive a gift yourself in the future, but he or she won't be able to get you something you already cannot get by yourself if he or she may buy it at all. Thus no matter how you look at it, spending money on someone else is completely irrational. You do not think about how the other person feels or how you may feel after receiving or giving a present with logic, dissimilar to how it is with emotions.
As such I am often unable to interact with people properly as my actions may be deemed 'aloof' and 'cold' when I find nothing wrong with it, even if it were to happen to me. You may have come across the 'if me and this other person were on a cliff... who would you save?' question. It may very well be that I will save the person who I deem has more utility to society if he or she were to survive, even at the cost of my own relatives, much to the dismay of my mother. At the moment I am finding a way to shift this paradigm, but after having this method of thinking for so long I do find it hard to look at such situations in a non-usual way. This is something that I am currently dealing with.
How about you dear readers? Do you find my way of thinking perfectly appropriate? Or do you find that my way of thinking clashes with the paradigm of the current society? Please do let me know what you think and what I should do to correct myself if the answer to the latter question is 'no'.
Cheers,
Matthew Tan
I like to view myself as a person of reason, it meaning that everything I do has an entirely logical reason behind what I am doing. What I did find recently is that logic and emotion tend to clash quite a bit. For example, showing signs of affection to a younger sibling in terms of buying presents has no rational meaning. It is unlikely that you stand to get anything tangible in return, and thus you are spending resources earned by yourself only to invest in something with no returns. Of course, you may expect receive a gift yourself in the future, but he or she won't be able to get you something you already cannot get by yourself if he or she may buy it at all. Thus no matter how you look at it, spending money on someone else is completely irrational. You do not think about how the other person feels or how you may feel after receiving or giving a present with logic, dissimilar to how it is with emotions.
As such I am often unable to interact with people properly as my actions may be deemed 'aloof' and 'cold' when I find nothing wrong with it, even if it were to happen to me. You may have come across the 'if me and this other person were on a cliff... who would you save?' question. It may very well be that I will save the person who I deem has more utility to society if he or she were to survive, even at the cost of my own relatives, much to the dismay of my mother. At the moment I am finding a way to shift this paradigm, but after having this method of thinking for so long I do find it hard to look at such situations in a non-usual way. This is something that I am currently dealing with.
How about you dear readers? Do you find my way of thinking perfectly appropriate? Or do you find that my way of thinking clashes with the paradigm of the current society? Please do let me know what you think and what I should do to correct myself if the answer to the latter question is 'no'.
Cheers,
Matthew Tan
Comments
Post a Comment