People Who Need To Feel... Anything

There are two views of the Good Life.

The first is that a good life is full of good works: what matters are the kind, useful, constructive, healing, things we do.

The second is that a good life is full of feelings and relationships, and it does not matter what those feelings and relationships are: what matters is to feel and relate intensely.

It's binary: your temperament is one or the other.

You may, however, believe one, while living the other. Believing that life is for the feeling, but living sensibly, is very common amongst former drunks, junkies, coke-heads, divorcees, and the like, not all of whom enjoyed the ups and downs of their chaos. Chaos is not emotion. You can have emotions and still have a clean and neat kitchen. People who live for feelings often do good works, but for them it's a by-product not a goal.

The people who live for feelings don't just want rainbows and candy-floss. Emotions need to be sweet and sour. Anger, disappointment, frustration, grudges, revenge, contempt, resentment, are just as good.

Football fans are like this. They would like their team to win, but what they really don't want is a nil-nil draw after ninety minutes of faultless defensive play on both sides. They want the roller-coaster. It's the same as gambling: losses work the emotions as much as wins.

Any emotion is better than no emotion. Any relationship is better than no relationship.

This is only dysfunctional from the point of view of Stoicism, Protestantism, and other such fun-sucking approaches to life, many of which on closer examination turn out to be associated with aristocracy and established wealth. In many societies, vigorous, engaged, volatile, emotion-based action and reaction is prized and honoured by the masses, and is thus highly functional, providing the emotional roller-coaster ride that makes living, well, Life.

Therapists who emphasise having "good" emotions and "good" relationships , or at least removing the bad stuff, dumping the users, losers and abusers, are in fact closet Good Works people. Emotions and relationships can only be "good" and "bad" relative to some goal or purpose. Whereas to the emotion-centric emotions and relationships have intrinsic value for good or ill.

Understand that "sour" emotions are as satisfying, if not more so, than "sweet" emotions, and many puzzling things become clear. Especially why people stay in so-called "dysfunctional" relationships, or take stupid risks, or believe daft things: it's all about the emotions. Take away those and their lives become empty, no matter what good things they may also be doing.

When emotion-centric people get older they can often seem to flip. Suddenly they don't like drama, and aren't interested in people who cause problems. This isn't because they have suddenly acquired a goal in life: it's because the rewards they get from the emotions are not worth the energy it takes to create and maintain those high-cost emotional states. The same cost-benefit calculations that kept them in and around chaos, drama, users and losers, now make them choose to live a quieter life, because the costs don't go down, but the benefits do.