Rationality is an underrated way to be authentic

I think most people have the experience that they have something like an authentic self, and when they are in situations that resonates with this, it feels alive. It fits.1

But it is not entirely clear what this true self is. What exactly is it we are trying to be authentic towards? How can you know that you have found your core? And how do you know what fits it?

But even if we accept that there is something like a true self, it seems hard to argue that emotions and intuitions can reliably guide us there. Our emotions and intuitions, first of all, do not come from within most of the time; they are implanted and controlled by forces outside of us. Second, what we feel is often unmoored from reality. Finally, and most importantly for the point I want to make in this essay, our emotions and intuitions are littered with contradictions.

I view reason (partly) as a way to bring different parts and versions of me into a conversation with each other, so they can share their intuitions and experiences and reach a shared understanding that feels authentic to both. L

A much more useful thing to do when my system starts to feel like a dead dogma is to go, “. . . oh? huh? Something feels a little off here?” and then sit with that feeling for five, ten minutes, or however long it needs to unfold.

First, there is a depolarization, meaning when I make sure that my emotion “feels heard,” the emotion stops seeing my system as an enemy. [...] Second, when I depolarize, I (nearly) always discover that my resistance to the system has some insight.

You can have good relationships and careers without being true to yourself—if you do things out of duty, for example. My grandparents lived like that, and I think it is beautiful. But it feels good when there is a fit between how you live and your interiority, and it makes it easier to iterate toward forms that are innovative and bring new value and meaning into the world.

Intuitions are a type of pattern matching, closely entwined with perception. They are qualified guesses. “Based on my understanding of the world, which is a compressed representation of what I have experienced [footnote: and also some things that are hardcoded into my genes because of stuff my ancestors experienced]—I think this guy is a sociopath.” It is a bit like how when you feed a machine learning algorithm with data, the algorithm can compress that data into a predictive model that captures important features of the data set: our intuitions are a very dense representation of our experiences. The richer and more well-calibrated your experiences are, the more insight your intuitions contain.

Inversely and importantly: if you are inexperienced, your intuitions might be noise.

Emotions, on the other hand, are the source of our values. We feel anger because we perceive that a political decision threatens the well-being of our children. We feel jealousy because a rival got something that we perceive that we need to flourish. Emotions are, in other words, not just waves of irrational energies that crash over us: they are a type of cognition. It is a part of cognition that assigns values to things, so we can make priorities and protect what is central to our well-being, or flourishing.

Intuition, then, encodes information about reality, and emotions gesture at a diffuse value system that we operate by, values connected to human flourishing. And we want to leverage the insights these processes surface. But we, also, want to be wary of how unreliable and filled with contradictions they are.