Lightbulb Moment #2 – Staying in the moment (part 3)

On a personal level, practicing present-mindedness has taught me such things as how to sit patiently in situations where waiting is the only real option, how to not be paralyzed by my own fears, how to choose productive action over destructive anger, and even how to love others for who they are rather than what they do for me. I honestly believe that it is the groundwork for tackling just about any problem an individual might face.

But I’m starting to suspect that present-mindedness has significant value on a much broader scale as well.

Everywhere I turn, I see people completely oblivious to just how enslaved they are by their emotions. Friends lying to each other out of embarrassment; motorists driving recklessly out of rage; wives spying on husbands (and vice versa) out of jealousy. When our emotions speak, the last thing any of us seems to do is question the validity of what we hear.

I understand that emotions were probably crucial to survival in the early years of human evolution. With danger potentially lurking around every bend, I can easily imagine how it would be advantageous to just run for your life first and ask questions later (or not ask questions at all). But as human society continues to evolve, many of the things that made our emotions so valuable in the past are quickly becoming obsolete. In fact, when left unchecked, our emotions can even impair the efficiency with which we function in today’s increasingly logic-driven culture.

That isn’t to say that emotions don’t have their uses. I tend to think of them as somewhat of a rudimentary compass; when we move towards happiness and away from sadness, the results will generally still be favorable. But where the problem arises is when something which might have brought us ‘happiness’ in previous millennia no longer fully applies in the modern world. What I’ve specifically noticed is that in today’s global community, we seem to gradually be moving away from ‘survival of the fittest’ and towards ‘survival of the synergistic’.

When we were all living in caves, when resources were scarce, the ‘every man for himself’ model probably worked best both on an individual level and on the species level. Humans didn’t have time to rationalize the best course of action in response to environmental pressures, so people in whom emotional reactions were the strongest were the most likely to pass on their genes. Fast forward hundreds of thousands of years and what we have as a result are the same propensities for emotional reaction but none of the environmental pressures which shaped them in the first place. There’s no significant abundance of man-eating creatures to run in fear of, no worldwide shortage of resources to angrily squabble over, and no biological necessity to jealously compete for the same mate. The modern world certainly isn’t devoid of threats to survival, but it at least allows us time to choose our reactions logically rather than emotionally.

Over time, human society has grown more and more interdependent. Consequently, what is best for humankind as a whole has increasingly become what is best for each of us individually as well, and that is a trend that I believe will continue for generations to come. The people who will be best equipped to survive in tomorrow’s world are those who do the best job of leveraging the power of human cooperation.

For all of these reasons, the inability to effectively manage our emotions appears to be one of the most significant impediments to the advancement of humankind. But that’s not to say that natural selection needs to run its course, slowly picking off those who are unable to rationalize at the highest levels. On the contrary, the beauty in all of this is that most of us probably already have a significant capacity for emotional management. We just haven’t begun to tap into it because we need to first be awakened to the fact that this capacity (and the necessity for it) is even there. Fortunately, present-mindedness is a skill which can be passed on from one person to another. It’s a process which I imagine is not unlike the one by which bacteria acquire resistance to antibiotics. But in this case, it’s our emotions to which the resistance must be developed.

Part 1, Part 2, Part 3