Storytime
We're instinctive animals. We act in accordance to what we feel: anger, happiness, compassion, pain. Your body is an evolution-optimized "soft machine" whose actions can be traced and explained by specific emotions. You are cold? You get a blanket. The pain your nerves communicate to your brain prompts you to act and look for warmth. You're angry because somebody flipped you off on your commute to work? Your return the gesture, or even escalate by cutting him/her off at the first chance. Emotion begets actions. We are slaves to the whims of our feelings. Entire religions and eastern traditions are built around the concept of achieving control over what we feel and emote. Nobel prizes are given to those who invent new branches of knowledge which merge psychology and economics (“behavioral economics”), based on the idea that our emotions makes us act stupidly. This is evidently a huge blind spot in all of us. A vulnerability that's been exploited for centur