Everything Is F*cked

You  Have  Two  Brains,  and  They’re  Really  Bad  at  Talking  to

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Each Other
Let’s pretend your mind is a car. Let’s call it the “Consciousness Car.” Your
Consciousness  Car  is  driving  along  the  road  of  life,  and  there  are
intersections,  on-ramps,  and  off-ramps.  These  roads  and  intersections
represent the decisions you must make as you drive, and they will determine
your destination.
Now, there are two travelers in your Consciousness Car: a Thinking Brain
and  a  Feeling  Brain.
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 The  Thinking  Brain  represents  your  conscious
thoughts, your ability to make calculations, and your ability to reason through
various  options  and  express  ideas  through  language.  Your  Feeling  Brain
represents  your  emotions,  impulses,  intuition,  and  instincts.  While  your
Thinking  Brain  is  calculating  payment  schedules  on  your  credit  card
statement, your Feeling Brain wants to sell everything and run away to Tahiti.
Each of your  two brains has  its strengths and  weaknesses. The Thinking
Brain is conscientious, accurate, and impartial. It is methodical and rational,
but it is also slow. It requires a lot of effort and energy, and like a muscle, it
must  be  built  up  over  time  and  can  become  fatigued  if  overexerted.
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 The
Feeling  Brain,  however,  arrives  at  its  conclusions  quickly  and  effortlessly.
The problem is that it is often inaccurate and irrational. The Feeling Brain is
also a bit of a drama queen and has a bad habit of overreacting.
When  we  think  of  ourselves  and  our  decision  making,  we  generally
assume  that  the  Thinking  Brain  is  driving  our  Consciousness  Car  and  the
Feeling  Brain  is  sitting  in  the  passenger  seat  shouting  out  where  it  wants  to
go. We’re driving along, accomplishing our goals and figuring out how to get
home,  when  that  damn  Feeling  Brain  sees  something  shiny  or  sexy  or  fun-
looking and yanks the steering wheel in another direction, thus causing us to
careen  into  oncoming  traffic,  harming  other  people’s  Consciousness  Cars  as
well as our own.
This is the Classic Assumption, the belief that our reason is ultimately in
control  of  our  life  and  that  we  must  train  our  emotions  to  sit  the  fuck  down
and shut up while the adult is driving. We then applaud this kidnapping and
abuse of our emotions by congratulating ourselves on our self-control.
But  our  Consciousness  Car  doesn’t  work  that  way.  When  his  tumor  was
removed, Elliot’s Feeling Brain got thrown out of his moving mental vehicle,
and  nothing  got  better  for  him.  In  fact,  his  Consciousness  Car  stalled  out.
Lobotomy  patients  had  their  Feeling  Brains  tied  up  and  thrown  in  the  car’s
trunk, and that merely caused them to become sedated and lazy, unable to get
out of bed or even dress themselves much of the time.

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Meanwhile, Tom Waits was pretty much all Feeling Brain all the time, and
he got paid copious amounts of money to be drunk on television talk shows.
So, there’s that.
Here’s the truth: the Feeling Brain is driving our Consciousness Car. And
I  don’t  care  how  scientific  you  think  you  are  or  how  many  letters  you  have
after  your  name,  you’re  one  of  us,  bucko.  You’re  a  crazy  Feeling  Brain–
piloted meat robot just like the rest of us. Keep your bodily fluids to yourself,
please.
The  Feeling  Brain  drives  our  Consciousness  Car  because,  ultimately,  we
are  moved  to  action  only  by  emotion.  That’s  because  action  is  emotion.
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Emotion  is  the  biological  hydraulic  system  that  pushes  our  bodies  into
movement. Fear is not this magical thing your brain invents. No, it happens in
our  bodies.  It’s  the  tightening  of  your  stomach,  the  tensing  of  your  muscles,
the  release  of  adrenaline,  the  overwhelming  desire  for  space  and  emptiness
around your body. While the Thinking Brain exists solely within the synaptic
arrangements inside your skull, the Feeling Brain is the wisdom and stupidity
of  the  entire  body.  Anger  pushes  your  body  to  move.  Anxiety  pulls  it  into
retreat. Joy lights up the facial muscles, while sadness attempts to shade your
existence  from  view.  Emotion  inspires  action,  and  action  inspires  emotion.
The two are inseparable.
This  leads  to  the  simplest  and  most  obvious  answer  to  the  timeless
question, why don’t we do things we know we should do?
Because we don’t feel like it.
Every  problem  of  self-control  is  not  a  problem  of  information  or
discipline  or  reason  but,  rather,  of  emotion.  Self-control  is  an  emotional
problem;  laziness  is  an  emotional  problem;  procrastination  is  an  emotional
problem;  underachievement  is  an  emotional  problem;  impulsiveness  is  an
emotional problem.
This  sucks.  Because  emotional  problems  are  much  harder  to  deal  with
than  logical  ones.  There  are  equations  to  help  you  calculate  the  monthly
payments  on  your  car  loan.  There  are  no  equations  to  help  you  end  a  bad
relationship.
And as you’ve probably figured out by now, intellectually understanding
how  to  change  your  behavior  doesn’t  change  your  behavior.  (Trust  me,  I’ve
read  like  twelve  books  on  nutrition  and  am  still  chomping  on  a  burrito  as  I
write this.) We know we should stop smoking cigarettes or stop eating sugar
or stop talking shit about our friends behind their backs, but we still do it. And
it’s not because we don’t know better; it’s because we don’t feel better.

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Emotional problems are irrational, meaning they cannot be reasoned with.
And  this  brings  us  to  even  worse  news:  emotional  problems  can  only  have
emotional solutions. It’s all up to the Feeling Brain. And if you’ve seen how
most people’s Feeling Brains drive, that’s pretty fucking scary.
Meanwhile, while all this is going on, the Thinking Brain is sitting in the
passenger seat imagining itself to be totally in control of the situation. If the
Feeling  Brain  is  our  driver,  then  the  Thinking  Brain  is  the  navigator.  It  has
stacks of maps to reality that it has drawn and accumulated throughout life. It
knows how to double back and find alternate routes to the same destination. It
knows  where  the  bad  turns  are  and  where  to  find  the  shortcuts.  It  correctly
sees itself as the intelligent, rational brain, and it believes that this somehow
privileges it to be in control of the Consciousness Car. But, alas, it doesn’t. As
Daniel Kahneman once put it, the Thinking Brain is “the supporting character
who imagines herself to be the hero.”
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Even if sometimes they can’t stand each other, our two brains need each
other.  The  Feeling  Brain  generates  the  emotions  that  cause  us  to  move  into
action,  and  the  Thinking  Brain  suggests  where  to  direct  that  action.  The
keyword here is suggests. While the Thinking Brain is not able to control the
Feeling  Brain,  it  is  able  to  influence  it,  sometimes  to  a  great  degree.  The
Thinking  Brain  can  convince  the  Feeling  Brain  to  pursue  a  new  road  to  a
better future, to pull a U-turn when it has made a mistake, or to consider new
routes or territories once ignored. But the Feeling Brain is stubborn, and if it
wants to go in one direction, it will drive that way no matter how many facts
or  data  the  Thinking  Brain  provides.  Moral  psychologist  Jonathan  Haidt
compares the two brains to an elephant and its rider: the rider can gently steer
and  pull  the  elephant  in  a  particular  direction,  but  ultimately  the  elephant  is
going to go where it wants to go.
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