Summary of 'Your Feelings Are Out to Get You'

Your Feelings Are Out to Get You is summarized below.

Over time, more and more people have come to express thoughts as having originated from feeling rather than from thinking.  The effects of this after growing mostly unnoticed suddenly became obvious and detrimental to the enjoyment of life.

You can see it any time someone expresses an observation or conclusion using "feel" instead of "think."  It appears that either people are being taught that feeling something is enough to act  without thinking, or they are not being taught that this is bad.  It could also be a combination of both.

When she first came upon the idea that her feelings didn't matter, the author felt hurt.  She believed her feelings mattered simply because she was a person.  She believed that her feelings were important to others and herself.  However, that pain was just covering up the truth, which is that when thinking, feelings aren't actually driving anything.  Feelings in fact have no impact on anything without the feeler choosing to act on those feelings.

Anyone could pretend that feelings do matter in order to protect themselves from emotional pain by seeking this or avoiding that because it feels good or feels bad.  In fact more and more people probably do, especially those who have never wanted for food.  However, pretending thus results in only more pain.  Furthermore, attempting to evade consequences caused by acting on feelings instead of thoughts through associating only with others acting the same way only delays and exacerbates the inevitable consequences.

Beyond the problem of delayed and amplified consequences, allowing feelings to guide you prevents you from learning.  Given that most learning involves someone teaching you and that you may not feel good about whoever is doing the teaching, your learning opportunities will be severely limited by this approach.  By ignoring painful information, you will end up living a painful shadow of a life you could have otherwise lived.

Feelings are not thoughts, and if you try to treat them as thoughts, or hide from the truth behind them, you will not succeed and the truth will in the end hurt you.  Going forward, think about whether hiding behind your feelings is worth sacrificing a joyous connection with reality.

2 Responses to “Summary of 'Your Feelings Are Out to Get You'”

  1. Diana Coman says:

    This is visibly broken in so many places as to qualify for that "not even wrong yet." Anyways, given the deeper trouble uncovered here, do first your own review of this summary, to get the most out of it.

    For any interested reader, feedback on the above was given in #ossasepia.

  2. [...] turned in something for the new task on time, but it was incomplete since I didn't ask anyone about parts of it that I [...]

Leave a Reply