Harnessing Emotions
Overcoming Discomfort & Utilizing Blue Chip Emotions
Dangers of Comfort
“If you look for truth, you may find comfort in the end; if you look for comfort, you will not get either comfort or truth, only soft soap and wishful thinking to begin, and in the end, despair.”
C.S. Lewis
We love comfort, but seeking comfort can lead to taking shortcuts and avoiding challenges. The comfortable path enables us to practice habits that reward instant gratification and prevent long-term goals from coming to fruition.
This isn’t to say that the way to success is paved by only misery and suffering.
There is a balance between living a comfortable life and a meaningful one. That balance could never be achieved if we aimed at comfort, but it could be achieved through aiming at truth.
Finding the truth gives us a realistic view of what is required for success, and only then is it possible to make peace with the high price of success and the demands of meaning.
Living a significant life is expensive and can only be paid if we know it. The price of meaning lies in the truth, but it is masked by comfort. The unfortunate part is that humans need to be comfortable. It feels so good and, on some level, makes life worth living.
Comfort, while seductive in its immediacy, thwarts our capacity to fail and, consequently, to learn.
The instinct to absorb new information disappears when our environment perfectly aligns with our expectations. Humans are creatures of necessity, and we only learn something new if we need to, so if everything around us is perfectly fine, then no learning occurs. This stagnation impedes our growth and confines us within the boundaries of our current understanding. When we stop learning, we become further from the potential heights of who we could become.
Be mindful of when we want to take the comfortable path. It will probably take us a long way and complicate our journey. I know this all too well from personal experience. Evaluating my intentions is worthwhile when making decisions, so I don’t change my behavior solely because something is comfortable. I change to be effective, not to be comfortable, because I believe the comfort will come as a byproduct of being more effective.
The easy way out often leads back in.
“Too many people believe that everything must be pleasurable in life, which makes them constantly search for distractions and short-circuits the learning process.”
Robert Greene
Nietzsche's Dichotomy: The Last Man vs. The Ubermensch
“The earth has become small, and on it hops the last man, who makes everything small. His race is as ineradicable as the flea-beetle; the last man lives longest.”
Friedrich Nietzsche (Thus Spake Zarathustra)
Nietzsche's conceptualization of The Last Man and The Ubermensch provides a framework for understanding our affinity for comfort.
In Nietzsche’s relatively poetic Thus Spake Zarathustra, a prophet named Zarathustra preaches to people in a town regarding his wisdom accrued from his careful reflection upon a mountaintop. He delivers a powerful but ill-received speech about the ways of The Ubermensch and The Last Man to a crowd awaiting a performance of a tightrope walker.
The Last Man, content with mediocrity and ease, trades growth for security, leading to a life devoid of creation and meaning.
The Last Man is named appropriately because he lives like The Last Man will be the last of his kind. The Last Man takes no risks and engrosses themselves with distractions such as fancy careers, the latest social event, and happiness to avoid seriously thinking about the meaning of these things. The Last Man pursues only comfort and security, consumes more than he creates, and never challenges the axioms of his time.
The Last Man resents his suffering and seeks to alleviate it, while the Ubermensch takes in his suffering and channels it into something more.
The Ubermensch embraces challenge and discomfort, channeling suffering into creativity and innovation. This pursuit, albeit fraught with hardship, cultivates a life that transcends the individual and contributes enduringly to the fabric of humanity. The Ubermensch is about challenging the status quo and truly thinking about life beyond what he is told. He goes on the tedious journey of creating a work that will outlast his life.
Appropriately enough, the tightrope walker was the only one receptive to Zarathustra's message. Nietzsche did a fantastic job dramatizing the dichotomy of The Ubermensch and The Last Man by juxtaposing the tightrope walker with the crowd. Not only was the tightrope walker the only person who understood the message, which suggests he’s closer to manifesting The Ubermensch than anyone else, but he was already demonstrating the characteristics of The Ubermensch by being the only one performing to the crowd.
Zarathustra describes man as “a rope stretched between the animal and the Ubermensch rope over an abyss,” accurately representing human existence. We constantly try to regulate and integrate our animalistic (Last Man) tendencies by striving to bring out the best in ourselves. If we choose not to play that game, we end up in an existential abyss where we are susceptible to pathological ideologies.
We either walk the tightrope or we get swallowed by pure chaos. Most of us choose to walk the tightrope, but the inconvenient truth is that walking towards The Ubermensch rope's end is difficult. It’s much more comfortable to drift towards The Last Man's end, and it’s useful to remember this.
The choices we must make to walk towards Ubermensch will always be difficult, but that is the price of creating something worthwhile and operating at the edge of our abilities. It’s painful in the moment, but something worthwhile always comes out.
Walking towards the Ubermensch is like sitting on the edge of order and chaos, but we impose our will on the chaos we encounter and create order of our own accord. This allows us to create and design the worlds we want to live in, but it comes from resisting the urge to drift toward The Last Man.
Coping with Discomfort
Our journey through life is punctuated by moments of understanding (order) and moments of bewildering complexity (chaos). This oscillation between chaos and order, inherent to the human experience, invites discomfort and suffering, yet it is within this discomfort that learning and adaptation flourish. This isn’t to say suffering is the only way to learn. We also learn to satiate curiosity, but that can be dangerous.
The Norwegian metaphysicist Peter Zapffe categorized how we deal with life's inherent suffering into four broad categories: isolation, anchoring, distraction, and sublimation. The first three are characteristic of Nietzsche’s idea of The Last Man, while the fourth, sublimation, is characteristic of the Ubermensch. Remember that these methods never solve the problem of the inherent tragedy but help us cope with it.
Isolation
Zapffe defines isolation, in the context of a method of repression, as “a fully arbitrary dismissal from the consciousness of all disturbing and destructive thought and feeling.”
Some examples of isolation include hitting the snooze button to stay in bed longer, keeping yourself away from things that scare you, or keeping your ears away from opposing views.
Isolation is comfortable, keeps us warm, and justifies our preexisting ideas, but it’s dangerous. When we isolate ourselves, we stop encountering the universe's natural chaos, which prevents us from learning. Learning gives us the tools not to suffer more than we already do. The key to learning more is to throw ourselves into challenging, complicated, and unknown situations. To hell with isolation!
Anchoring
Children explore the world with their simple understanding, and they can do so because the more complex understanding of adults mediates the real complexity of the world. Since this method works, the child desires adults to handle difficult and complex situations. The child uses the adult as a wall to protect itself from the overly complicated parts of existence, and this “wall” is known as an anchor. Adults never stop doing this because they “grow up.” They shift their anchor to something else, like their childhood home, neighborhood, or nation.
Zapffe defined anchoring as “a fixation of points within, or construction of walls around, the liquid fray of consciousness…the happiest…protection against the cosmos that we ever get to know in life.” Anchoring explains how people can drift towards gangs or radical nationalist groups. It also explains people’s desire to cling to what they know.
The unfortunate side effect of anchoring is similar to isolation—we cling to our walls, stop encountering the unknown, stop learning, and suffer more. Clinging to what we know is easy and comforting, but it treats the symptom rather than the disease. If we release our anchors, we can learn more and become more competent, and that competence will spill over into other parts of our lives.
Distraction
Distraction is usually the preferred form of repression for bored people who need to “burn time.” These characteristics are desires for existential distraction masqueraded as innocuous states of being.
Zapffe defines distraction as “a very popular mode of protection [where] one limits attention to the critical bounds by constantly enthralling it with impression.” Modern technology proves that Zapffe’s speculations of distraction being a popular option were correct. Our streaming services, social media, video games, and cell phones are just a few examples of modern tech that rewards us for distracted thinking and condition us to expect continuous information input. This isn’t a critique of modern technology, and it’s just that we created these particular characteristics of modern technology to fulfill our desires for distraction. Our need for distraction is so deep that we’ve built machines that reward us for not thinking about life's inherent suffering. On a personal note, distraction drives me crazy. It’s such a plague to everything beautiful about human beings. When we ignore the distractions of this sort, we create something truly special.
I’m always at war with the side of myself that wants to drift towards The Last Man, and it takes a tremendous effort to overcome it. Still, the unfortunate reality is that people usually don’t check their tendencies and allow distractions to inhibit others. We see it in mindless entertainment, insatiable consumption, insufferable parties, and fake performances. Distraction is destructive, but the payoff is massive, given that we’re adequately distracted. If we’re distracted, we don’t have the burden of thinking about the tragedy of life. Still, we lose the ability to see life for what it truly is, in all its beauty and catastrophe, and this blindness prevents us from bringing forth our Jungian Self.
Sublimation
What happens if isolation, anchoring, and distraction aren’t enough?
Zapffe describes a fourth method in which one transforms the problem into purpose. This is known as Sublimation.
It is what people inevitably do when the other three methods aren’t sufficient. Regarding the four methods of repression, he says, “The present essay is a typical example of sublimation. The author does not suffer. He is filling pages, and he is going to be published in a journal.”
I say that is a perfect example of sublimation.
As mentioned above, sublimation is characteristic of The Ubermensch because to create something that may outlast you, you must channel life's inherent tragedy into something other than complete despair and anxiety.
To create, we must sublimate. Sublimation can also be defined as channeling the energy from an inappropriate urge to an appropriate urge. In this case, the impact of the tragedy of life can be channeled into something that can help others deal with the tragedy as well (an appropriate urge) rather than using it as an excuse to shoot up a school (an inappropriate urge).
This is where creation is born.
Creation can be seen as internalizing the world around us and transforming the parts of suffering into something novel and good. I think I practice this with my blog, music, lesson plans, and other creative endeavors. After all, most of my passions came because I was trying to deal with suffering and wanted to alleviate that same suffering for others.
The Role of Creation & Emotional Regulation
Creation emerges as a potent antidote to life's inherent suffering. It allows us to momentarily divert our focus from existential dread while contributing positively to the collective human experience. This act of creation, whether through art, innovation, or thought, assumes a life of its own, influencing the world in unforeseeable ways and affirming the capacity of all individuals to shape their reality.
Though innately human, our quest for comfort exacts a heavy toll on our potential for growth and self-realization. The real value lies in embracing discomfort; through this engagement, we unlock learning, creativity, and a deeper sense of fulfillment. Striving towards The Ubermensch, we can navigate the tightrope of existence with purpose, transforming our inevitable struggles into the fuel that propels us forward.
In confronting the discomforts accompanying growth, we face emotional regulation—a skill pivotal for traversing the landscape of personal development. According to Bessel van der Kolk in The Body Keeps the Score, our brains are wired to ensure survival, necessitating a balance between activating internal signals for needs and adjusting our actions based on external demands. This balance is crucial in managing our emotional responses to challenges and discomforts. Emotional regulation involves top-down and bottom-up strategies—mindfulness and meditation to strengthen our mental oversight and engage our autonomic nervous system through breath, movement, or touch for physiological recalibration.
Engaging the Blue Ribbon Emotions for Growth
Drawing from Temple Grandin's insights in Animals Make Us Human, and Jaak Panksepp's concept of "blue-ribbon emotions" as detailed in Affective Neuroscience, we recognize the fundamental impulses that drive behavior—SEEKING, RAGE, FEAR, PANIC, LUST, CARE, and PLAY.
The lower-down parts of a pig’s (or other animals’) brain are nearly indistinguishable from the lower parts of a human brain. Panksepp called the core emotion systems the “blue-ribbon emotions” because they “generate well-organized behavior sequences that can be evoked by localized electrical stimulation of the brain.”
This means that when you stimulate the brain systems for one of the core emotions, you always get the same behaviors from the animal.
SEEKING is the basic impulse to search, investigate, and make sense of the environment. It is a pleasurable emotion.
RAGE evolved from being captured or held immobile by a predator.
FEAR is experienced when survival is threatened in any way (physical, mental, or social).
PANIC engages when an animal experiences a loss of social attachment.
LUST is sex and sexual desire.
CARE engages when an animal is involved in maternal love or caretaking.
PLAY is not well known but is a sign of good welfare. Animals that are angry, depressed, or frightened do not play. I would argue that play is where the most effective learning occurs.
Each of these emotional systems offers a pathway to understanding and harnessing our intrinsic motivations for learning and adaptation. Engaging our SEEKING system encourages exploration and curiosity, which are vital for intellectual growth and overcoming the inertia of comfort. Similarly, recognizing and managing FEAR and RAGE can prevent these emotions from paralyzing or leading us to avoid challenges.
Strategies for Overcoming Discomfort
To navigate the journey from The Last Man towards The Ubermensch, we can use several strategies:
1. Embrace SEEKING: Cultivate curiosity and a love for exploration. Embrace new challenges as opportunities for learning rather than threats to comfort.
2. Acknowledge and Process Emotions: Use mindfulness and reflection to recognize emotional responses to discomfort. Understanding that emotions like FEAR or PANIC are natural responses to the unknown can demystify stepping out of comfort zones.
3. Sublimation as a Tool for Transformation: Channel negative emotions or experiences into creative or constructive outlets. This alleviates the immediate weight of such emotions and contributes positively to personal growth and societal development.
4. Build Resilience Through Practice: Regularly engage in activities that push boundaries, whether physically, intellectually, or creatively. Over time, the discomfort associated with these activities diminishes, expanding our capacity to tackle new challenges.
5. Community and Support: Leverage the support of others on similar paths. Sharing experiences and strategies can provide encouragement and practical advice for navigating discomfort.
6. Reflect on Long-term Goals: Regularly remind yourself of the larger purpose behind facing discomfort. Aligning daily actions with long-term aspirations can provide the necessary motivation to push through temporary discomforts.
By acknowledging our proclivity for comfort and consciously choosing to engage with discomfort, we enhance our ability to learn and grow and move closer to realizing our fullest potential. The path towards Ubermensch is fraught with challenges. Yet, precisely, these challenges mold us into stronger, more capable beings capable of crafting a life of meaning and purpose.