Functional emotions

It seems to me that there is a problem in how some people view and pursue their emotional states. Most people will conduct their entire lives pursuing a particular emotional response, such as happiness or pride. They will marry, they marry ill-advisedly, they will manage their careers, they will read books and attend lectures on the pursuit of happiness, they will steal, they will kill, they will abuse drugs; they will do whatever is necessary to attain a few blissful moments when glandular tissue in their brains is secreting a pleasurable chemical. Whatever means they choose, their goal is to make those cells secrete happiness.

What's wrong with this is that people pursue things like happiness and love as if they were the ends to some means. Happiness is not an end to any means; it is a means to some end. It is a functional tool, like a compass, and to no one is following a compass an end to some means; we follow compasses to arrive at some goal.

So what are the goals of happiness and similar emotions? What are these internal compasses trying to lead us toward? Should we really be following them? Emotions are evolutionary adaptations. They were not developed specifically for your benefit or best interests. They developed because the creatures and communities of creatures who had something similar to them were more likely to endure and reproduce.

That in mind, they can be a reliable guide, but they can also be a treacherous one, because evolution does not always have my best interest at heart. It is also a very slowly developing mechanism, and we are a very quickly developing species, so much of the emotional information imbued in us at birth is better suited to the necessities of ages long since gone. They're misguided, confused, self-defeating, and inapplicable to modern society. Many of the things that they drive us toward are of no benefit to us whatsoever, either because we live in a different circumstance or because they were never meant to benefit us at all, but to benefit our offspring. So emotions have some limited relevancy to us still, but we should take their advice with a large spoon of salt.

In any case, they are functional, as tools, and a tool is only ever a means to an end. A wrench is a valueless and queer novelty if there is nothing to tighten. When we are driven to some end by our emotions, we must examine that end and make a conscious and informed decision on whether or not that end is worth pursuing and is in alignment with our values, because this compass doesn't always point north.

As for the people who aim to cheat their biology with substance abuse by tricking their brain into drowning itself in pleasurable neural-chemicals, they are missing the point of the emotional response entirely; they are misusing the tool, and as such, they suffer for it.

Emotions are our tools, our slaves; we must never be theirs.