The effect of emotions

‘I don’t give a damn’, ‘I know this is not good for me, but I like it the way it is’. These are many decisions that we tend to make often, however when we look back and give it a thought, often we realize that we have stepped out of the ‘logical world’ to a world governed by our emotions. However, the positive side to it is compelling enough for us to forget the negatives – positive emotions make this life worth living – somehow we all want to differentiate ourselves from machines and robots.

Before going in deep into what I have been struggling with for sometime, I want to give a logical overview to what made me think in this direction. I took help of a very close friend for this: mathematics! - another example of emotions, though positive.

In many ways, life to me should be governed by linear programming – we keep allocating our resources or making decisions in a way to maximize the objective function. <click here to know more about LP>. Now this objective function is extremely subjective as we all have different goals in life, different ways to look at what we consider as good and a different picture of ourselves sometime down the time line. So, I will leave this debate out of this discussion, but our maximizing function could be anything – getting to certain position, being a CEO of a top notch firm, doing maximum good to humanity, making difference to the way people lead lives, inventing something that could change the way we live or simply being a balanced person successful in most arenas of personal life without being exceptional at any.

I believe that the above is something extremely personal and would range from person to person, probably differing by the stage of life we are at and the cycle of success and failure we have been through. So, what is common is that we all have or rather should have a maximizing function governing our lives, but the coefficients (could be zero for variables that don’t mean much to us) that each of us assign to the above variables are a matter of personal choice and the perception of our picture of the ‘ideal life’.

Now we move to defining the constraints to the linear problem. In the LP of our lives, the constraints could be many like our intellectual ability, the opportunities in the place around us, our input in terms of pure hard work, our prior commitments to other spheres that act as a constraint, our resources (sometimes monitory) that we can afford to invest in to get future gains (e.g. education) and then our emotional balance. There are many other constraints that we can think of, however the discussion from now on would focus on our emotions. However, given that there are so many other factors/constraints that can limit us from achieving our "full potential", why should be focus on emotions?

There are two reasons for it in my view. One is that we only work to improve the constraints that are within our ‘locus of control’ or very simply, we can bring about a change in factors like emotions and cannot go all the way to improve the GDP and education opportunities in our respective countries.

The other reason and the motivation behind this discussion is the very nature of LP. Now, let me demonstrate the LP that I was talking of in a very simple one dimension world:

Our objective function:

Maximize x – let it be a very simple objective function

The constraints being:
x <= 10 – say for intellectual ability
x <= 20 – say for the amount of input we can put in
x <= 15 – say for the opportunities available
x <= 30 – say for our prior commitments towards family, etc
x <= 4 – for our emotional balance

The solution to the above simple LP would be x=4. So, when we look back at other factors, we have achieved only 40% of what our intellectual ability promises, 20% of the input that we can provide in, 26% of the opportunities made available to us, 13% of prior commitments and 100% of our emotional capability!

The above example is to demonstrate the effect of one constraint, in actual ‘LP of life’, there would be many dimensions/variables making it complex, thought the understanding of relaxing a constraint would remain the same.

The above ‘efficiencies’ could have looked a lot better if we had somehow made the constraint of emotional balance a bit softer. i.e. someone with better emotional balance could have utilized some of these externalities in a better way.

There have been many theories that have tried to reduce the effect of negative emotions. One of these is ‘detachment’ – in lines with care about your input and not exactly the rewards that you would get. This sounds good to control negative emotions, once you are not deeply involved emotionally, the outcome will not ‘hurt’ you in anyway. But, I have never been able to follow this, not because I cannot ‘detach’ myself, but because I feel the drive and the motivation would die down if the final result if kept out of the equation. This is true in my view as there are many critical decisions that we need to make in pursuit of any goal or objective function and without the focus on the outcome, it is very likely that lesser important things would grab our attention, or with obstacles on the path, we might not have the perseverance to go all the way without keeping in mind the outcome.

Given the draw back of the above theory, in an ideal world, I would want to follow the ‘modulus function’ – wherein, the positive emotions stay the way they should and I have internal mechanisms to counter negative emotions. It is much easier said than done. In the last few months I have tried to hunt for ways to get to that state, but it is not easy. And this probably is the motivation behind this discussion.

In my view, there are many things that come in the way in achieving the ‘modulus function’ state: the biggest problem that I think in these situations is ‘ego’ – if it was not for our own ego, it would have been so easy to just let go the negative emotions. A lesser word for ego is ‘self respect’ or the need that we all have to be ‘counted in the scheme of things’. I have been trying to find answers to this puzzle. It would be great if you could help me with this with your views, suggestions and an answer to the ‘ego conundrum’. I would also like to know if the above logic of looking at ‘life as LP’ is the most appropriate way. The other way is to look at it as a regression equation, wherein one variable/constraint cannot have as big an effect as in LP.

Please mail me your views at anupammathur11@yahoo.com or reply to this post with your comments.