Possessed

I make my best decisions based on my emotions and passions.  I devote a lot of time to inner reflection and knowing myself so that I can take risks without calculating them and jump on opportunities without weighing options.  It's important to me to live like that because my way of thinking has really never gelled with reasoned analysis.  I have been most unhappy when I've done the "logical" thing.  Logic has never really meshed well with the kind of lifestyle I enjoy.  When I was in college, I thought that meant that I should embrace a reckless lifestyle since I didn't embrace a logical one.  And luckily, that turned out to be a rationalization, which proved to be based on faulty reason.  And so, I finally came into my own in the past few years and have cultivated a strong inner language that I rely on for all decisions, including who I date, how to spend money, and staying committed to my academic pursuits despite the many frustrations.   It has saved me from the exhausting malaise of not feeling enthusiastic about life despite having nothing reasonable to complain about.

All this is to say that I suppose that intuitively, I've always rejected Rational Choice Theory.  This article in the New York Times today expressed something I've already been thinking about since the current literary theory that I am pursuing as my intended career focus is predicated on the failure of rational choice theory.  I really liked reading this in a new context outside of the classroom!  It also gave me a boost of confidence in a week that has felt oppressively stressful.  The stress has been clouding my usual clarity, so it was nice to read this and find a moment of clarity in the day when I was actually connecting deeply with something in the news -- a rare occurrence -- and  reminded of how I really do think that reason leads us astray many times and can explain a whole lot of unhappiness if one is willing to dig deep and acknowledge that some decisions, despite brilliant reasoning, are crushing the soul.  

At yet another intersection between life and literature, my answer to the failure of reason in my personal life -- and increasingly in my intellectual pursuits -- is a significant amount of self-examination or autocritique.  I think that this is one of the strongest forms of resistance to the soul crushing aspects of our culture.  Knowing the deeper aspect of the self requires a certain rejection of the logical frameworks and reasoned analyses that lead us to believe we retain our agency.  In fact, calculated behavior is a limited form of selfhood because it denies our emotional intelligence and its role in making good decisions.    I'm mostly thinking about all of this because I'm starting in on a research paper, which is focused on possessive love...I'm currently thinking through the correlation between personal possessions and possessive love.  It seems to me that our culture's fixation on possessions -- be them material possessions, like wealth, or immaterial possessions, like power -- have perverted the way that we love and stunted our ability to develop deep emotional bonds by creating a cultural mindset focused on possessions, so that love and emotion become something to "have," rather than something to experience.  And what good is "having" love if you can't feel it?