Positive Emotions Can Only Be Maximized Through Using Reason

We are creatures with rational potential but irrational practice

Among all creatures on earth, we have unique capability for rational thought. Judging from the disposition of the average person, you would never guess it.¹ Most people suffer from severe impediments to rational thought, suffering from underdeveloped critical thinking skills, unfounded confidence, and an inability to notice what is different or better than what they already think, desire, have, or do.

If these rational limitations were the only problem impeding the use of reason, society would be in a much better state than it is. The bigger problem is that those with the abilities to think critically and notice what is different or better willfully decline to use them. Most people today are so possessed by their emotions that they rarely exercise reason at all, except to rationalize their emotional actions after the fact.

The search for joy requires you to develop your rational capacity and learn to subordinate your feelings to reason. The benefits of preferring reason to emotion are not limited to the overarching purpose of maximizing joy, but cascade throughout your entire life.

Most people seek for what feels best right now

Most people don’t make choices based on reason. Instead, they make choices based primarily on emotion. They act to maximize present pleasure and avoid present suffering. The problem is that seeking to feel good right now will never yield the greatest feelings long-term.

Actions that feel good in the moment are likely to generate much worse feelings in the long-term, and what feels good long-term will almost always feel bad in the present. The truthfulness of this relationship is enshrined in aphorisms such as: “Sacrifice the present for the future,” “the hardest thing is usually the right thing,” and “hard choices, easy life; easy choices, hard life.”

The search for what feels good now is not the search for enduring joy, as what will maximize joy long term cannot be found through what feels best now. Instead, reason alone demonstrates the path to enduring joy, independent of what feels good now.

Seeking for maximal joy is a rational—not emotional—process

It is no surprise that so many people are so unhappy when so many prefer irrational reactions to intentional rationality. Automatic, emotional reactions are guaranteed to limit a person to much less joy than they would otherwise have.

Decisions that optimize for long-term joy require thinking. Only through thinking can you discover, enumerate, and select what is best. While feelings are automatic, thinking is not. What little thinking occurs today seems mostly occupied with composing post-hoc reasons to justify decisions already made emotionally.

Reason is required to maximize the quality and duration of feelings. Prioritizing reason over feelings does not kill them; it makes them stronger, more enduring, and deeper.

Joy is not merely a sensation of the flesh, but a physical sensation coupled to and at least amplified (but sometimes wholly caused) by thought. Joy is the fusion of sensation with reason. The fulfillment of the potential of both sources is required to maximize the composite. To think of or experience joy only in terms of a physical sensation or solely as a product of the mind is to rob it of its richness.

If you seek to maximize your joy, you must increase your reasons for having it. You must understand the relationship between feelings and value. Feelings are the conduit through which you sense value. Feelings do not produce value—they flow from it and endure because of it. Value is maximized by reason, not feelings.

Greater meaning causes greater joy than greater physical pleasure

By nature, people seek intrinsic pleasure, prioritizing how they feel over the meaning of what they feel, think, and do. Intrinsic pleasure flows from feeling to thought: from the bodily sensation of what you accomplish, experience, give, or receive to your understanding of its meaning.

Joy is maximized through extrinsic pleasure, or by prioritizing the meaning of what you feel, think, and do over how you feel. Extrinsic pleasure flows from your thoughts: from the understanding of the meaning of what you accomplish, experience, give, or receive into the actions you take to advance your purpose in yourself and in the world. These feelings come because of the value you mentally associate with them. They can be just as intense as intrinsic pleasures, but they can endure as long as the meaning that generated them continues to prove true.

Joy from meaning is more enduring than joy from physical pleasure. Pleasure based on physical experience can only last as long as the physical situation that generated it. These feelings can be intense, but they are never enduring, and can disappear completely if future experiences reveal them to be other than what you thought they were. Joy from meaning is not as fickle as physical feelings. It is not limited to the continuation of a physical experience, and will continue as long as the underlying understanding guiding one’s thoughts about value and purpose remain unchanged.

Joy from meaning is stronger than joy from physical pleasure. Physical pleasure in and of itself is insufficient to overcome the many challenges that will threaten it, such as perspective-changing additional information or overwhelming emotional pain. However, when strong enough, meaning can provide sufficient motivation for you to continue to strive in your purpose against any negative feeling, including pain, sorrow, anxiety, fear, and depression.

Joy from meaning lies more within your control than physical pleasure. Meaning is not maximized through emotion, but through intentional exercise of reason. Your physical situation is subject to the choices of others; your reasons and choices are not.

The joy that comes from following your purpose will dwarf any joy that can come from the pleasure of a purely physical experience. With time, extrinsic pleasure will always come to dominate intrinsic pleasure. The mental meaning of what you find truly valuable will always overcome the feeling of what you experience only physically. No matter how pleasurable a physical experience might be, it will fade, but your mental appraisal of its value over time will remain to the extent your understanding of reality is correct.

Joy from within is greater than joy from without

It is common to think about happiness in terms of something that happens to us, as in: “What makes you happy?” But what happens to you is the least common, least valuable, and least enduring source of joy. Joy need not be limited to what happens to you. Joy can come from you.

The greatest joy comes when your circumstances within and without are aimed at what has the greatest value. While you can do a great deal to influence what happens external to you, you can’t fully control it. While your actions will have a limited effect on your external situation, your internal perception and interpretation of your external situation are fully within your control. You can choose to let go of what lies outside of your control, and that choice is easier to make the more you focus on what is within your control. You can have joy within you, no matter what happens around you. The joy that comes to you because of who you are inside cannot be affected by what happens to you on the outside.

Part of the joy that comes from the inside is due to the character qualities you develop and live according to. Outward outcomes are not the most important metric of the value of past choices. Who you are as a result of your choices is the most important outcome. You determine what qualities you embody through what you do, how you do it, and why you do it. The only way to feel good as often as possible is to seek out and correct all deviations from what is best in yourself and your life.

Only a reason-first approach can intentionally maximize value

How you treat every aspect of your life can be characterized on a spectrum from fully passive to fully intentional. Each aspect of each person’s life will fall somewhere on this spectrum, and where you choose to be in each will make an enormous difference in your life.

Passive action is going with the flow. It is like putting a canoe in the river and allowing it to drift wherever the current takes it. While this may indeed be easier, it guarantees you will not arrive where you want to go. The reality of the situation is worse still. Passive action is neither as innocuous or as beneficial as coasting a canoe downstream.

Passive action is to act according to feelings, and your feelings will lead to substantially worse options than rational thought. Reality is very complex. You can’t find your way to a destination that involves navigating obstacles without intent. If you are optimizing subconsciously, you are also optimizing suboptimally. Not only will you aim at worse things, you will shift arbitrarily between multiple unrelated targets each and every day, vastly restricting the resources you have to achieve even the few aims you will have under reduced intentionality. Recall the prior analogy: Thinking that random action seasoned by human nature will produce outcomes even nearly as good as those produced through honest intention is even more foolish than expecting to hit the bullseye in a game of darts when you are blindfolded and spinning in a chair. Reality is very complex. You can’t find your way to a destination that involves navigating obstacles without intent.

Rational thought is like traveling to a predetermined destination in a canoe, paddling, steering, and navigating to intentionally traverse obstacles to get there. Operating from an attitude of intentional reason, you can both more clearly enumerate the available options for action and more accurately assess the cost and benefit of each, resulting in a much higher likelihood of a much better decision than operating merely on emotion.

The more explicit you make your actions, feelings, and thoughts, the more you can apply reason in choosing what you do. “Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.”²

Only reason can help you maximize long-term joy

You should think of your emotions and your rational capability as occupying different parts of your brain, and assume that you can only operate one center at a time. If you are in the one, you must necessarily not be in the other. Whenever you act, ask yourself which center you are acting from.

Feelings and reason are not the same, nor are they equally useful. Feelings show you more about what is possible. They tell you nothing about how to obtain it. Feelings are a motivation to act; positive feelings invite us to act so as to maintain them, and negative feelings invite us to improve so as to overcome them. Reason is the sole source of discovering and walking the path to enduringly obtain the positive feelings you believe are possible while mitigating the negative feelings you might otherwise experience.

Maximizing long-term positive feelings and overcoming negative feelings is not the same as maximizing short-term positive feelings or avoiding negative feelings. The greatest long-term joy will require you to encounter and overcome many negative feelings, and the greatest long-term joy will require you to experience periods without it.

In order to maximize joy from meaning, you will have to intentionally strive for it and against the natural drift toward immediate gratification. Joy from meaning tends to be found in opposite paths than short-term pleasure. Joy is maximized through improvement, but shortterm pleasure tends to run contrary to improvement. Improvement frequently includes short-term pain, which is the opposite of short-term pleasure.

Desire for immediate pleasure will always compete with desire for long-term joy. In every moment, you must choose which you prefer. If you prefer the latter, you will do what will bring the greatest long-term benefit, irrespective of time.

It’s common to seek for rewards in the tasks we engage in from moment to moment, but the joy available through those means is inherently limited. To maximize your long-term joy, you must condition yourself to place the value of future consequences above your present situation. This is not as simple as preferring delayed gratification, as there is no reason that your overall purpose can’t connect to and generate positive feelings in the present. To find greater, longer-lasting joy, you must upgrade your motivation from the rewards available at the task level to the rewards available at the purpose level. This is one example of how the life plan provides a more sophisticated and correct paradigm for understanding so much of which can’t be understood in simpler structures.

The life plan helps you see the consequences of your actions with a more sophisticated and longer-term perspective. With it, you are armed with reasons to perceive your well-being as something other than however you feel in the moment. Instead of passive and unconscious bodily reactions, you perceive and receive punishments and rewards in the context of the bigger picture, with a more accurate understanding of the value of the choice at hand.

In this more amplified context, you can transcend the limitations of rewards and punishments at the task level. While you will continue to enjoy task-level rewards, your main motivation will be transcendent. For example, you won’t just lift weights to feel good while lifting weights, or even to look better in the mirror, but because you know exactly why you need to in the greater context of obtaining the greatest joy in life.

As you grow into a broader mindset, you will have to intentionally contradict the automatic association you make with your present action and the present result. You will have to learn to prefer the rational expectation of the long-term result for the immediate emotional response.

How you feel about something right now will only align with how you will feel about it later to the extent you can predict the future

Using present good feelings to guide present choices is a surefire way to minimize future good feelings. Positive present feelings are the rewards for prudent past choices. Good feelings from good past choices are a key ingredient to maximal joy.

Because awareness increases through time towards greater truth, the only way to maximize joy long term is to maximize your knowledge of the truth and the alignment of your actions with it. How you feel about something will only align with how good it actually is to the extent you know the future.

What feels good today will only lead to what feels best tomorrow to the extent that you can accurately predict the future and confidently choose the best of the options before you. In the event that you correctly appraise all options and choose what has the greatest net benefit, you will continue to feel joy in your choices. In the event that you choose emotionally or incorrectly appraise the net benefit of the situation, you will eventually feel less joy because of it, and potentially even feel sorrow and regret that retroactively robs past joy.

An emotional mindset will never accurately anticipate the value of the future. To find greater joy, you must learn to predict and value the future honestly, and this can only occur through exercising reason in preference to emotion. Only the rational approach will result in your willing sacrifice of the present for the sake of the future.

Long-term maximal joy is found through learning and choosing what improves the most, which almost always means choosing against immediate pleasure in favor of much greater future gratification.

Meaning makes something feel good or bad, and you can change meaning

For some reason, humans conflate what feels good or bad with what is actually good or bad. We do this in spite of having the ability to reason, which empowers us to identify and choose what is best longterm even if it doesn’t feel best right now. Only by seeking for what is actually good—independent of how it feels right now—can you optimize your long-term feelings.

Reason is a powerful tool that allows us to transcend the limits of unthinking emotions to evaluate the actual costs and benefits of available options and calculate what is best. When we rationally judge something by its merits, we make a moral judgment of its value through comparing its cost and benefit as dictated by our beliefs. We do none of that when we merely judge something by whether it makes us feel good or bad.

The folly of allowing our emotions to guide us instead of using reason is like navigating to a desired outcome by walking in whatever direction takes the least effort compared to using a map and compass. Following the path of greatest-present-feeling is guaranteed to lead you to a place of lesser joy than what you would have reached through the exercise of reason.

What we colloquially call “good feelings” are, more often than not, not good at all, and what we call “bad feelings” can very often be good. Not only is the pleasure of the moment distinct from the actual goodness of the moment, it tends to be the opposite.

Whether a feeling is good is not determined by how pleasurable it is. Whether a feeling is good is determined by whether it yields perceived improvement or not. Perceived improvement will, in turn, yield joy, which is the most pleasurable feeling there is.

Never underestimate the effect of the meaning you perceive in the experiences of life. Enduring joy is derived from meaning, and the meaning we find or don’t find in life’s experience will determine how much joy we experience and hold onto in life. Internal meaning applied to external circumstances can provide enduring joy in spite of fluctuating external circumstances, including those that lie outside of our control. Internal perspective can transcend external circumstance and can perceive value beyond any amount of suffering possible here.

What makes an experience good is not the pleasure of the moment, but the meaning of the moment. When we experience what we perceive as valuable, we consider it good even if it is painful, and when we experience what we perceive as not valuable, we feel bad, even if it is pleasurable. While a person touching a hot stove would experience a bad feeling, the same sensation felt by a firefighter in rescuing a trapped person would elicit great value; a person suffering from lifethreatening pain might claim this is a pure negative sensation, but a mother giving birth interprets her pain differently. Meaning makes all the difference.

Those actuated by emotions think they are reacting to things outside of their control, as if the effects of their emotions were as inescapable as gravity is to a person who falls off a building. The truth is, you don’t have to feel bad even if bad things happen to you any more than you have to feel good when good things happen to you. You control how you feel by how you react to what happens to you, and you do this by how you interpret reality. Emotional reactions are just as information-based as the most deliberate rational choice. The only difference is whether the interpretation is intentional or passive.

Acting for the greatest long-term joy will often feel bad short-term until you learn more about cause and effect

Emotions are powerful tools that can assist us in beginning, continuing, and valuing what is good when they align with your purpose, but they don’t always align with your purpose, and quite regularly point in a different direction altogether.

You want your emotions in play when they help you achieve your goals. You don’t want them around when they make life harder than it already is.

It is possible to feel absolutely terrible while doing exactly what will best advance your purpose, and it is also possible to feel amazing in the moment you are acting as opposite as you can to your purpose.

Future feelings can only be maximized through present exercise of reason. Reason alone can accurately gauge long-term cost and benefit. To maximize long-term joy, you have to develop the ability to accurately predict the future and the discipline to choose the path of greatest long-term net benefit, even when this requires choices that presently feel much worse than alternatives.

Transforming your present joy appraisal into the long-term view

The amount of joy that you encounter in this life will very much depend on how much you learn to appraise value through long-term rational calculation rather than short-term emotional experience.

Your ability to appraise and choose long-term rational value will depend on the wisdom you develop and the time you take to actively think about and reflect upon the past, present, and future.

Your ability to experience anticipatory pleasure can be changed, and as you change it, you will increase the audacity and timescales of the goals you are willing to attempt while experiencing much more joy along the way.

Humans, by default, assign enormous preference to the present, even at the expense of the future. It is human nature to prefer shortterm pleasure to long-term progress.

Test how well you are considering the future by injecting the following questions into every decision you make:

1. What timeframe am I considering when making this choice? It is rare to consider the effects of a decision over a lifetime, let alone for subsequent generations.
2. Would I change my decision if the long-term consequences I expect occurred in the next 24 hours? Many decisions would be made differently if the decider valued their future as much as they value their present.

Much of what we see as an individual’s vices are really just an attenuated ability to register the value of future reward in the present. For example, researchers have shown that people with eating disorders do not experience pleasure from looking ahead to future events.³

Through repeated iterations of setting and attaining goals, you will lengthen the time horizons of your experience of joy. With every iteration from planning to achievement of goals, you will gain increased evidence that long-term progress in your purpose provides greater joy than short-term pleasure.

Long-term joy requires a correct understanding of reality

What we feel is real—but it doesn’t necessarily reflect any part of reality except what exists inside of us. Emotions are a channel of information, but they are perhaps the least useful because they can have so little fidelity to reality. You are the conductor of a symphony of incoming information and outgoing action; emotions are merely one musician in the orchestra.

Emotions are very helpful for signaling that action is needed, but they don’t accurately help us determine what action is needed. They ought to trigger intentional entrance into rational mode, not dictate action directly while bypassing reason. Most people prefer a certain response when emotion is triggered: they get angry, they flee, or they ignore. Which do you prefer? When you notice yourself entering your fallback, stop and think about why you feel how you do, and what you can do about it.

You can and must acknowledge the reality of emotions without yielding to them. You can and must recognize the existence of your feelings without assuming there is a valid reason for having them. Your feelings do not justify your actions. They never can. Only reasons can justify actions, and if you choose to promote feelings to reasons, you are, by definition, an irrational person.

We live in an irrationally emotional society where peoples’ feelings take precedence over rational thought and even objective reality, as abundantly manifested by examples that increase in quantity and magnitude by the day.

The validity and worth of emotions is determined by how aligned with reality they are. A feeling divorced from reality cannot endure the revelation of what exists but is as-yet unknown. Because reason is the means through which we discover reality, enduring feelings cannot exist apart from reason. While feelings can exist and can be powerful without reason, they can only persist as long as the underlying ignorance upon which they are based endures.

To gain greater joy, you must understand something about objective reality—a concept that is antithetical to those who believe reality is constructed from their feelings. Those who insist on persisting in ignorance or willful delusion will only be disappointed time and again, as reality will eventually always force itself into and shatter any illusion with pain proportional to the degree of correction.

Pleasure based on ignorance cannot last, and it will always be replaced with greater misery in the face of reality. You will not continue to find joy in what is revealed to you as folly. This may well include something from the distant past, and it can happen no matter how significantly joyful you found it at the time.

Long-term maximal joy requires accuracy in understanding reality and living according to the greatest benefit. As you live according to your best understanding of reality, you will learn more about it. As you gain a greater understanding of reality, you will learn to value corrections in your beliefs rather than see them as unpleasant.

Bringing forward future joy to the present through correct understanding of reality

The way most people experience joy in the present is through baseless expectations based on wishes about the future. To the extent your expectations about the future are false, your present joy will be robbed from you and exact an emotional penalty that exceeds any benefit your false joy provided.

Accurate anticipation of the future holds the promise of greater present joy with fewer disappointments. Your ability to trust in your belief that your present actions will yield the future outcomes you predict will determine how much enduring joy you will bring forward into the present. The unwillingness of normal people to make and live plausible long-term plans precludes them from experiencing the greater portion of joy here and now. Meanwhile, surprises in one’s expectations of reality are almost always of the type that cause negative feelings until and unless one becomes so acclimated to the process of learning that they interpret discovery of their own previous limits in a positive light.

The long-term optimal path contains far greater joy than the present emotional path

You’ll only perceive present opportunities and stretch towards future potential up to the limits of your belief in the value of what lies beyond what you presently see. As you consider the value of potential future options, don’t limit yourself to how things are here and now.

Your desire should expand to the fact that future outcomes exist that are far beyond the best thing you can currently imagine. Remember, joy is Pareto distributed, and that means that in all likelihood, whatever you have experienced in your life so far is insignificant compared to what is possible.

Discipline is acting according to reason, not feelings

Discipline is the practice of acting in submission to a chosen purpose. Discipline is how well you execute what should be done in spite of how you feel about it.

Discipline comes from purpose, not feelings. When you transcend your feelings in service of your purpose, you become disciplined.

Feelings are fickle, and those governed by them are slaves to a master they can’t summon on demand. Your purpose, on the other hand, is always waiting for you whenever you choose to attend to it.

Discipline can overcome any feeling. You can’t always directly control how you feel right now, but you can always control what you think and do. When you are disciplined, you have complete control over your mind and your actions. You choose what you want to think and you do what you want to do.

Discipline is explicit and active. It requires intentional consideration of all options of action available and the selection and execution of the choice of the greatest long-term value.

Discipline detaches from the short-term. Discipline frequently requires you to act contrary to your short-term feelings.

How the life plan minimizes regret in spite of unavoidable learning

The complexity of reality guarantees that those who are paying attention will look back at past decisions and realize that they would decide differently if they faced the same situations today.

Consideration of past decisions tends to fill people with guilt and shame. These feelings do not need to occur, even when you learn more and better after the fact. Guilt and shame come from a recognition that you did less than the best you knew at the time, not from having learned something better after the fact.

While you feel guilty about something, you still haven’t done all you can to fix it. When you have done all you can to address a problem, you no longer feel guilty about it. When you do all you can in all the most important things, you will be completely free from guilt.

There is never anything you can do to change the past. You can and should identify past mistakes because it means you have learned from them, won’t make them again, and now have the wisdom to help others avoid them. If you realize something you’ve done to hurt others in the past, it gives you the opportunity to try to make things right.

A wonderful benefit of the life plan is that it provides evidence that you did the necessary due diligence to formally define what your best looks like according the character qualities you most admire, your present values, your present understanding of reality, and the many demands of your present life.

As you live according to your life plan, you build protection against future guilt or shame. In the event that you upgrade the qualities you most admire, change your values, learn more about reality, and so on, you will know that what you did was exactly what you believed was best, and you will even have a written record of why you felt that way.