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.