Feelings Don't Get A Vote

A woman is madly in love. She tells her friends, her family, anyone who'll listen, that she could never live without this man.

The next morning, she finds bombs in the basement. A map, too, marked with his next target. The man she couldn't live without? Turns out she can't live with him.

The one thing I've come to know about feelings is that they cannot be trusted. They shift the moment our information changes.

Take Mr. Alex for example. Every time he's near Sandy, his breath takes a vacation — his feelings, never. Every day for six months he watches her and wishes for a chance to lie with her.

Finally he gathers the courage to speak to her. And in that conversation, he learns they share a father. The same man who walked out on Alex and his mother years ago, to go build the family Sandy grew up in.

Now when Alex sees Sandy, the arousal is gone. In its place, rage. Misplaced rage. She did nothing wrong, she was a child too. But he feels rage all the same. In the twinkle of an eye, his feelings didn't just fade. They swung in the complete opposite direction, just like the UK weather.

I hear you thinking it already: “AB, why do you always use extreme examples?”. To be honest, I don’t know. I guess extremes have always helped me put things in perspective.

Is there a science to this? 🤔

Feelings have fascinated me for as long as I can remember. And like everyone, I've had my fair share of their oscillations — swaying left, then right, as more information surfaced. On quite a number of occasions, driven by how I felt in the moment, I’ve made bad decisions. Decisions I wished I could go back in time to undo.

So naturally (as the self-proclaimed scientist you're surely tired of hearing about), I began to ponder on whether decisions could be approached scientifically. A method that weighed the reliability of each input before trusting the output. One where, if feelings made the cut at all, they'd be the least-weighted variable.

Every answer starts with a question. Two, in this case:

• Are my feelings trustworthy enough to be the deciding factor here?

• What outcome do I actually want, and what information do I need to get there?

Putting It To The Test

Yesterday evening for example, I was so tired and exhausted. Every cell in my body was chanting “Give us ice cream now!”. I wanted something cold, sweet and satisfying. And it felt like if I didn’t have ice cream right in that moment, my misery would climb exponentially.

So I ran the questions.

Trustworthy enough to decide? Well, experience has taught me feelings aren’t a good infrastructure for decision making, so I parked them aside.

Preferred outcome? Not waking up bloated and breaking out, which is exactly what ice cream does to me. Besides, I have speaking engagements this week, and the last thing I need is to spackle my face with makeup to cover the damage 🫠

The decision made itself.

That’s not the funniest thing that happened though. I woke up this morning, not craving icecream, but feeling pride that I hadn’t given in to my cravings.

Feelings, feelings, feelings. I've always known you were never loyal. But to swing from "I'll die without this" to "I'm so proud I said no" overnight? That's all the proof I need that feelings don’t get a vote.

I rest my case. Have a great week ahead, amigo. ❤️

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