STOICISM | QUOTE OF THE DAY
Test Your Impressions
A significant part of growing up is learning to react to feelings less and rely on logic and reason more.
Definition: Impression (noun)
an idea, feeling or opinion about something or someone, especially one formed without conscious thought or on the basis of little evidence
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Instincts and gut feelings are good. They served us well in ancient and even not-so-ancient times when our daily lives were filled with the same activities over multiple generations: hunting, gathering, raising children, etc; with little variation.
Our lazy brain is always on the watch for patterns to minimize the need for analytical thinking that it can bookmark and quickly jump to conserving energy.
But we no longer live in that world and brain evolution is SLOW, so we need to override our lazy brain with a new system.
We have to train ourselves (and our children) to slow down and check that our conclusion that we come to so quickly is logical and reasonable. Does it stand up to the test of reason?
Just because it feels good or right in the moment doesn’t make it so. Feelings are real…
