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Our emotions are complicated things. They are reactive, subjective, ever changing, only logical in their cause-and-effect’ functioning, and extremely difficult to quantify or accurately describe. Two people can have drastically different reactions to the same moment, one person can have dramatically different reactions to a repeated identical experience, we can feel them with incredible intensity and have no conscious idea of where they are coming from, we are capable of both fixating on them singularly and of experiencing multiple conflicting emotions simultaneously.
Our emotions motivate us at our most visceral level. With discipline and practice we can manage and channel them but even for the most masterful of us there are limits to our powers of control. Stoked to extreme enough levels of intensity emotions can overrun any logic or reasoning, even if sometimes their method of doing so is to so severely warp our perceptions and pervert our logic we end up blinded and puppeteered by an illusion of control.
The one constant thread is the primal motivation towards pleasure and away from pain. And before we get carried away winking and nudging about those who derive pleasure from pain remember they are still following the principle. They are seeking that which gives…