Arthur C. Brooks argues that chasing feelings makes you inconsistent and unhappy. Emotions are liars that flip your beliefs on religion, politics, and everything else. Real fulfillment comes from discipline and purpose, not from reacting to moods shaped by sleep or what you ate for breakfast.
Don't chase feelings. If you chase feelings, you're going to convert your religion every 10 minutes, you're going to convert your politics. Every 10 minutes, you're going to go with your feelings. Your feelings are liars. Your feelings will deceive you again and again and again. The whole point of a happier life is transcending your feelings, is managing your feelings. That's the whole point. Discipline matters and you need a coach in discipline. What it really is all about is conquering yourself. And to conquer yourself, you have to conquer your feelings. And so that's the point. You get to choose, but don't be bouncing all over the place like a pinball. That's just sentimentalism and that's your feelings managing you. And that's a sign of a lack of discipline. And that's a problem for your happiness, but also for your effectiveness as a person.
Right. It's also strange. It seems like people are driven to make a statement about what they believe at any certain time.
Yeah, totally. I mean, it's all virtue signaling in theater. A lot of it is. It's all just sort of feelings based nonsense. Are you going to build your life on purpose? Are you going to build your life with a sense of strategy, with a goal in mind of the person that you want to be? Or are you going to go according to how you feel this morning? How breakfast sits and how well you slept last night, Whether your spouse yelled at you this morning? Probably. So we can't let that world, what the world does to us, the atmosphere, the environment, the ecosystem around us, determine actually how we're going to feel and therefore create our path for us. That's a mistake.
