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Hello everybody,
Tomorrow (Friday, Aug 28), there is a Mini Philosophy and Big Think live event. It’s on the philosophy of decision-making and I will discuss a lot of what I write about today. This is a perk for all paid members. If you want to register to attend and ask questions, click the button below. Thanks!
What made you open this newsletter?
What shadowy undercurrents made you check in on me today? I suspect it wasn’t much of a conscious decision. You probably didn’t stare into space for five seconds weighing the pros and cons of clicking versus carrying on your internet scrolling. Surfing the web, we once called it. A different time.
No, there is something about you, something deep in your being, that pushed you to open this newsletter. And thank you for doing so. You’re very welcome.
This newsletter will carry on a bit longer, but will you? Because just as there was something that made you click, there will be something that makes you read to the end or something that pulls you away. There is no easy answer to what that thing is. The neurochemical processes underpinning decision-making are still mostly unknown to the best of modern science, let alone to me right now. And those unseen forces, those unseen hands on the strings, deserve more recognition. They deserve a newsletter.
You see, we don’t tend to call people “moody” these days. And that’s mostly for good reason. For hundreds of years, moody was a term overwhelmingly used by men to describe women. A husband tells his wife she’s being moody, and so her complaints are unjustified. A brother tells his sister to stop being moody as he steals her toy. A doctor tells a patient she’s just being moody: “Just go home, take some painkillers, I’m sure it’ll be fine in a week.”
But it turns out that we are all moody. Your moods define how you perceive the world. They define how you remember the world. Your moods define what the world even means. We can all “be in the mood” to do something — you were in the mood to carry on reading until now.
So, let’s indulge that mood. Let’s explore the philosophy of moods.
Go well,
Jonny
The lenses that tint the world
Your moods are not the same as your emotions. Emotions are temporary moments of feeling that act as a response to the world. They rumble inside in reply to some thought or experience. They might linger, as when a child watches a horror movie they’re too young to see, or they might disappear as quickly as they come, as when we mistake a tree’s shadow for a dusk-time assassin. They might be strong, as with the lust of seeing someone incredibly good-looking, or barely noticeable, as with the slow burn of falling in love. But emotions are often far more reducible to a kind of input-output model. While they might force our minds a certain way or motivate our actions, they do not define our experiences as much as our moods do.
The German philosopher Martin Heidegger argued that moods show us how far we are “thrown” into this world because moods will frame the kind of world we see. They are the unknown and unseen. They are the eyes with which to see. Or, better, they are the lenses that tint the world.
Heidegger was a fan of the Danish existentialist with the sad eyes: Søren Kierkegaard. In his 1844 work, The Concept of Anxiety, Kierkegaard makes a distinction between “fear” — the emotion — and “anxiety” — the mood. Heck, if you’re in the mood to explore this philosophical rabbit hole with me, you can even find this distinction way back in Augustine. Then Pascal uses it in his Pensées, and Kant uses it in his Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View. Which means that if you were a well-read, early-20th-century philosopher reading Heidegger and Sigmund Freud both reusing this worn distinction, you’d likely roll your eyes. And now I’m here to wear it some more.
The point is that there’s a difference between fear and anxiety. Fear is a response to something out in the world. It comes and then goes when the trigger is removed.
“Okay,” the teacher says, “we’ve got time for one more presentation today.” Your heart bounds into your mouth, thump-thump-thumping along.
“And it’ll be… Cole. Come on up.” Phew. Not me. The fear subsides.
Anxiety, though, changes the world because the anxious person sees everything through their anxious lens. Things of great importance are reduced to nothing, while trifles are made into terrible catastrophes. A curtly worded email gets amplified into, “Well, I might as well look for a new job ’cause I’m getting fired on Monday.” The same could be said of the depressive, the joyful, or the restless person. All are “moody,” at least in the Heideggerian/Augustinian/Freudian sense. Moods are vantage points on the world.
We can never be rid of our moods. Even if it were possible, it would be undesirable. A life without moods? It sounds like being trapped in some kind of OpenAI hell. To experience the world objectively without any feelings about it whatsoever is inhuman. We cannot be rid of moods, so what is a life-planning, rationally inclined philosopher to do? Should we shrug our shoulders, give in to our limbic puppet masters, and say, “Couldn’t help it, guvnor, was my hormones!”
Well, there are two things to do.
The first is to recognize that being influenced is not the same as being forced. Yes, our moods might incline us to think or behave a certain way, but we still have discipline and self-control. We have our limbic system pushing us to do something, but we have our prefrontal cortex as a counterbalance. Being angry doesn’t mean you have to cheat on your partner. Being tired doesn’t mean you have to be mean to your colleague. Being anxious doesn’t mean you have to catastrophize a single event into a global conspiracy to destroy you.
The second comes with identifying the push and pull of our moods. Knowing that a certain mood can influence our thoughts allows us to try to align our moods in a certain way in order to influence our thoughts. Many addiction recovery groups will use an acronym, “HALT,” which stands for Hungry, Angry, Lonely, and Tired. They know that if you are any of these, you are more likely to make bad and ill-thought-out decisions. That’s good knowledge to have. So, eat well, take deep breaths, call a friend, and get a good night’s sleep. Our bodies respond to the environment we choose to put them in.
We are all moody. The idea of a rational, detached overseer oversimplifies what it is to have a mind. But we are not puppets, either. Some shadowy undercurrents might have motivated you to read to the end of this newsletter today, but you also have the discipline to choose to do so in the future. I thank your prefrontal cortex in advance. Unless such arrogant presumption makes you less likely to do so, of course.
IN A QUOTE
Jonny is the creator of the Mini Philosophy social network. He’s an internationally bestselling author of three books and the resident philosopher at Big Think. He’s known all over the world for making philosophy accessible, relatable, and fun.
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