One of my favorites quotes goes something like “No man has ever accumulated enough wealth, knowledge, or power to escape the simple fact that ‘you win some, you lose some’.” Now, the guy who wrote that wrote a lot of stuff I don’t like or agree with, but this quote has always rang deeply true for me. I adapted it into “All life comes with problems, but I have the agency to arrange my life to have better problems than worse ones.” When the worst part of my day is, say, blisters from walking or a rude cashier, I genuinely feel happy to realize, ahhh, these are great life problems.
While part 1 had me ranting to my partner about the nuances of attachment & aversion, wondering if this article would frustrate me, haha, I ultimately found this piece to be such a breath of fresh air.
The part about negative emotions being motivating seems critical. In my opinion (and experience), it makes far more sense to cultivate skills that properly digest emotion (a middle ground between expelling & repressing), instead of cultivating a practice to never ever feel negative emotion at all. The latter sounds like a recipe for neuroticism.
I also take this stance, but with a different framework. I acknowledge that emotions & thoughts are very different biological technologies in action. One is likely extremely older than the other in terms of evolutionary development. Given that, from my perspective, my inner monologue is just not very good at translating — so my self-awareness needs to translate the translation. To me, an emotion is never false; it’s always a valid reaction in some way or another. I just know it’s silly to agree with the first interpretation my mind makes of it.
Anger is a reasonable reaction to a certain level of hunger. It’s is our generalized boundary alarm. Anger over hunger says, “the boundary of normal function is being crossed, and I’ll have to release stress hormones to keep going if we don’t consume food soon”. Anger is a great emotional choice/trigger for this, because it usually prevents you from deeply focusing & staying still, instead motivating you to move towards a resolution of the feeling.
So in my framework, emotions don’t provide any false information. But my thoughts might. Thankfully that’s what mindfulness/self-awareness is for, being more ‘whole’ and not just living from tiny cone of awareness that is the inner monologue / surface layer of thought.