Emotions vs. Intellect: Decide Now to Live a Good Life

 Most of us are confused about the relative importance of intellect and emotions in living our lives

The movies and novels play a crucial part in our lives. Most of us spend a lot of time watching movies and reading. Is it a mindless pursuit of entertainment, or is it an unmet human need that attracts us?

Most of the good movies are not compilations of amazing shots and special effects. These movies try to touch our souls with their emotional appeal. They are a great source of inspiration and parasocial needs. The writers try to talk to us about some aspect of life and our psychology, or the writers endeavor to present incredible knowledge or scientific research based on fiction.

Most of the big-budgeted movies use consultancy services of experts, researchers, and professors to correctly portray the most modern information-based futuristic projections that can inspire adolescents and young people to watch and fall in love with a movie.

For example, movies, like Avatar, create alternate realities to present new systems of spirituality, based on a connection with the environment, to let the viewers better understand their relationship with their own planet. Once we have seen an alternative life setting, and the mindless pursuit of hidden treasures on that planet, we can somewhat better understand how the mining of fossil fuels can destroy the ecological balance of our planet. The needless killing of other animals to create human colonies is a crime against planet Earth. The governments of the world take crimes against them very seriously, but all the governments have to realize that they exist on this planet, and they have to take crimes against planet Earth seriously as well. The movie entertains and educates us.

The education systems of all the countries lag behind the cutting edge discoveries in the world of science and knowledge. It is convenient, for the governments, in the sense that continuously updating the books of all the students of the world was not possible before the invention of the internet. This lag is approximately 20 years. Twenty years is a long time in today’s connected world where ideas travel at the speed of light, and new research can reach everyone.

Still, a big part of the world is learning its way of living life from this outdated and biased system of education. Here, the more fundamental human quality for living a good life is intellect. At least most of the parents think it is. They also believe that feelings and emotions don’t matter in the real world.

However, the novels and movies can’t earn money if they don’t present powerful emotions and connect with their viewers on an emotional level. They propose emotions to be the most basic human quality for living a good life.

These two opposing opinions create confusion in our minds. But there is a solution.

Most of the people who go to watch movies or read novels are people who have been reading academic books for their exams and tests. They feel bored with these books. They want to experience some emotions and feel inspired to keep going during their tedious and unemotional studies.

The academic books — that are without emotions — are usually objective reasonings and empirical results based on laboratory research or research surveys. The macro pictures of different fields of study fail to make any sense of reality on a micro — individual — level.

Intellect based reasoning is necessary for large scale analyses and macro-level studies. Individual emotions will not be of much help, or the research will become too complicated if they took personal feelings into account.

Academic disciplines are trying to incorporate the effects of emotions where they are required. Some newer fields of study, like neuropsychology, are trying to observe the individual decision making scientifically. Economists have to consider human responses and emotions seriously to build consumer models that can help predict demand and supply. They are interested in learning about our feelings and emotions and how we form our habits inside our brains, and a new field of Neuroeconomics is emerging to explore the neural connections that are responsible for our buying choices.

But the question remains: is studying emotions the same as feeling them?

Back to movies and novels, these cultural products have been trying to convince us to trust our gut and follow our intuition while making important life decisions. As our life experiences are unique — despite general similarities — we have no time to analyze our life situations objectively or test them in a laboratory setting. Life events keep happening at a frantic pace. We cannot ask for a timeout in most life scenarios to research the topic thoroughly or read a book before making a decision. Even if we had read a book or searched for the question on google, our unique life circumstances wouldn’t be covered there.

At such times, we have to trust our emotions and our gut to make a decision that has the potential to affect our entire lives. The movies and novels create or try to create life experiences, as if these were thought experiments of some kind, to let us feel that situation and create a scenario in our minds to help us think about our possible decisions. We compare our choices with that of the hero, or another movie-character, to reach significant conclusions about our lives.

Our emotions form the foundation of our relationships and the way we react to events in our lives. They are the basis of our character and our ability to accept and overcome our daily life challenges.

A Case Study: Chris Myers, the author of Enlightened Entrepreneurship, moved ahead of more intelligent colleagues in his workplace. But years later, he observed that although his son Jack had an IQ of 145, he couldn’t achieve similar success. Myers reasoned that success in both life and business is related to “emotion, relationships, and character rather than raw intellect.”

For better or worse, intelligence can come to nothing when the emotions hold sway. ~ Daniel Goleman

We can say that although when we are looking at the big picture, intellect is the main ingredient that has helped human beings to move forward as a species, but on an individual level, living a good life depends on a mixture of past personal experiences and emotions. Emotions — especially our gut feelings — play a more significant role in helping us make the most important decisions of our lives.

We can only guide ourselves with intellect to experience life through observation and study, but our feelings and emotions must ultimately guide us in living a good life.

Originally published on Medium.com