From Personal Passion

In ancient Greece emotions were called passions by the philosophers. Many considered emotion to be the source of all suffering and resisted its pull. We call these mighty thinkers: the stoics.

I love emotion.

I love its ability to tunnel through whatever stands in your way.

I love its ability to make those you love into gods or saints, and to render those you hate to somehow less than human.

I love that so many of our passions are mere scars of evolution, like my overwhelming love for fat and carbohydrates.

On the savanna carbs and carbohydrates were hard to come by, so those who were willing to do anything to get them, tended to have more babies.

Add technology, industry, and political stability and BAM! you have an obesity problem in the richest nation on earth.

If you have any doubt that my tendency to overeat is a passion, you have obviously never eaten with me!

I love how the only way to dominate these scars of evolution is to use other scars of evolution.

I love to overeat, but I want my peacock feathers to be the brightest and most beautiful of all.

Peacock feathers are not adaptive. They hinder the birds ability to avoid predators in a major way.

But the feathers attract females, so they have survived evolution.

Also any animal who can survive the pain in the ass (joke intended) which is the peacock tail is going to have good genes.

I am controlling my passion for food in the name of being attractive.

And I am not alone.


Emotions are sublime.

They emerge as neurochemical and hormonal phenomena which in turn affect the muscles and glands of the body. The blood flow, the output of white blood cells.

Yet somehow they transcend this.

If we trigger the physical stimuli which we know emotion emerges from, we can get a general feeling.

Like how oxytocin causes people injected with it to feel trust.

But oxytocin is also one of the causes of a mothers bond with a child, this has so many subtleties that we cannot cause this exact synaptic symphony in the lab.

At least not yet.

What are our emotions if not the soul.

I want to catch the soul in a jar as I once chased fireflies as a child.