I often ask myself and other people 'why do we do the things we do?'
A simple question, but eerily complex thought process occurs when one is trying to answer the question.
I'm now convinced that roots of all motivation arises from the concept of pleasure-seeking behavior and displeasure avoidance behavior. I think most people who are troubled to answer the question or can't distill it down to a simple manner, at the end all answer can be summarized into that sentence 'pleasure seeking behavior and displeasure avoidance'.
I've met someone who claimed himself to be a hedonist when I asked him what is his strongest compass of his philosophical beliefs. Now that I think about it, everyone is a hedonist by their own definition.
Think about it, our life will be utterly meaningless the day we become alien to the definition of the word 'happiness'. We sustain living because there are things that makes us happy, to see the brightness of tomorrow and to see the light even in our darkest days, we seek pleasure and there's nothing wrong about it, it's just that maybe the 'word' 'pleasure' has too much 'sensual affect' into it, so it's a bit strange when people throw the word around, but that's beyond my help. Pleasure means simply doing the things that make us happy.
Our motivation, acts, then ruled out to be the word 'behavior' really didn't stray further from dogs. Except when it comes to 'rationality', it's what really sets us apart from other animals.
Someone vented to me about her frustration when it comes to giving advice to her friends who quite frankly, 'pardon my language', her friend (girl) is cheated by her boyfriend 10 times and still remains with him. My friend act of giving an advice is solely out of care yet she felt troubled when her advice is discounted as if it was nothing to begin with, her efforts backfire as if her words meant nothing as her friend at the end of the day stays with the fella. She is quite troubled by the fact that there is little to nothing she can do to prevent a possible impending sadness if she is cheated for the eleventh times. The situation is quite alien to me but I tried to explain her, 'such is the nature of humans with their pleasure seeking behaviors, that one just went overdrive with little to no remorese on his rationality, truly I feel when it comes to a bad person, they don't deem the bad things (like cheating) to be bad, as no man chooses evil because it is evil; he only mistakes it for happiness, the good he seeks.
So rationality measured by the act that we weight in other people's decision and sometimes our own is what gives us 'as a human, homo sapiens', higher than animals? But our rationality is only constrained between humans, and the term rationality itself.
I told her, 'I may have a similiar instance when it comes to giving advice that I know is ultimately my friend's own decision to make, I usually end my advice with a remark: Personally, I wouldn't think that X is a good thing to do (staying with the abuser), and I would leave if I were you.' I often don't get too emotionally attached when it comes to decision that other people's make as I know their mind is not my mind and there's little to no use trying to project myself as them as we have completely different life.
She asked me 'Then, how come my friend chooses to stay?' in which I said 'I think, this is a textbook limerence case, people do crazy things with love, but no one is crazy. Limerence is a phenomena, (dictionary.com: the state of being obsessively infatuated with someone, usually accompanied by delusions of or a desire for an intense romantic relationship with that person) in which (I jokingly say), it's almost as if, she has become one with the man, now she can't leave the man, doesn't matter how much damage the man can impact to her.'
'There's a lot of crazy stories surfacing out of the phenomena called limerence, it's almost funny on how much our highly appraised work of arts are the stories of limerence, it's almost as if it's the face of humanity itself, the interplay of life and the flavor that limerence adds, its the peak of life, at least that's how some people experienced it to be, this is to be seen on how some people have commit suicide out of limerence, van gogh committed suicide out of love, keven the story of romeo and juliet she added.'
'Yeah even the film we watched together, the notebook, it's apparent that the movie that a lot of people has grow to love, is as a matter of fact, a screenplay of limerence, as Noah literally couldn't live and as he devoted his life by his job and constructing the house and waiting for Allie literally for all his life, the blend of the self towards the other, it is true that 'we are what we repeatedly do means we are what we make of ourselves, depicted on what we do.' It's funny because it's true, then in the movie, Noah and Allie literally died together at the same bed.
The romanticization of romance movies and words getting spurred around like 'oh what will I do without you', or what my ex girlfriend from 7 years ago used to say 'you are the best thing that ever happened to me', 'I literally don't know what I'll do without you', but then we are not together anymore and it is quite apparent that she can do things without me, so out of my personal experiences I can deduct that limerence is a phenomena, but it doesn't mean I discount the value. Sometimes 'limerence' is worth chasing as it gives more flavour to 'situations' called being alive, or sometimes as many people puts it, the meaning of life heavily resides in having a meaningful family.
Now at what certain point we want to tell ourselves that we are distinct from any other animals? At least mammals.
Mammals like dogs and cats seem to live a pretty simple life, as what some people say. Yet we look ourselves in the mirror and want to seprate ourselves from our feelings, just for feelings to catch ourselves and made us move our veins to do our acts, we are motivated because we have feelings and perceived emotions.
If I were to bravely say, the distinction lies in the 'extrapolation' and 'consequences' of the very own same 'pleasure-seeking behavior' when it harms other people. Pleasure-seeking behavior that went nuts and the self has completely become a slave to its own biological machinery of it's own pleasure-seeking reptilian brain, a cold blooded shiller.
Rationality and cognition just stopped the pleasure-seeking machinery to go completely balls crazy as cognition's job is to tame raw premordial emotions when it wants to get everything that it wants, even at the cost of harming other people.
Then I proceed to tell her 'You know I'm a big fan when it comes to behavior as I like to understand things and the consequences of theories and implications and such, I once read an article that made me understand why people say: once a cheater, always a cheater. I think it has something to do with cognitive dissonance that practically goes in the same way that 1. I am good a person, 2. But I cheated. Cognitive dissonance occurs when one has two beliefs that contradicts with each other, it troubles the self until the self change one of it to align with the other, in this case, a cheater would rationalize the circumstance that he brought himself and think/justify the act of him cheating as good, thus: no man chooses evil because it is evil; he only mistakes it for happiness, the good he seeks. Cognitive dissonance occurs all the time it's a phenomena reoccuring in human behaviors so its apparent that once he done it, he is more likely to do it again as he sees little to no harm in doing it.
Perceived emotions, pleasure-seeking, and now we talk about displeasure avoidance.
In the modern world, I would assume that most people don't like the job that they are working at, yet they need to or in a sense they can always warp the whatever job he is currently working at and warp it into something nicer that he began to enjoy doing. But we are all in the same 'struggling' problem, in which in order to keep surviving, we need to make money. In a sense that having no money, being broke as fuck, not being able to hangout with our friends because we are broke as fuck, is a displeasure.
We want a house for our future family, we are happy when we can buy foods to eat, we are happy now out of the things that are sustained and bought with money and even to our very own survival of foods and water, we want to escape from poverty. We want to avoid displeasure.
Life will just resonates or rather, our actions are given life to these very simple principles.
Then comes the word 'value'.
Such is the nature of my previous example of the story of a man cheated 10 times, this is obvious that the man has conflicting 'values' with his girlfriend and hopefully to all of us that this man is a bastard man. Then 'value' should be derived out of the inverse of this scenario, in which the pleasure-seeking behavior resulted in a shared value rather than a conflicting/negative value. An activity becomes more meaningful as we train our brain to produce motivation of actions that we came to realize that it is not only beneficial for us but scales as more people see 'the shared value', the more enjoyable can life become. As we grow to love our activities more, as our life has become valuable not only to us but also for others that are close to us, truly are there any greater gift in life than the ability to feel pleasure and knowing that you are loved out of your own character that you've raised yourself and raised so high, depicted by the things you do?
This article was written at 03:38:00 and finished at 04:35:00