First Feelings, Then Reasons

I'm busy. Are you? Right now, the most important people in my life, those I love most, all seem to face packed and shifty agendas. Lives lived full to the brim inevitably produce oscillations of mood. This is common to humanity—feelings change within a day, a week, a year. All human souls experience the spectrum of emotions. People have different baselines though, similar to the hypothesized "set point" of weight. The idea is that if we diet and lose ten pounds, our weight very commonly rebounds to the set point that the body somehow remembers. Emotions have a set point, too, which like the weight set point varies from person to person. Some people are constitutionally happy; others tend toward the melancholy end of the scale. But even around emotional set points, feelings fluctuate. We usually think of moods as responses to life events. Unfairness, put downs, and failures make us sad or mad; friendship, success, and pleasure make us happy. The funny thing, though, is that our mood can shift without an immediate knowledge of the reasons why. We might ask ourselves, "Why do I feel sad? or "Why am I happy?" It's a funny quirk of the psyche that, very often, we feel before we know. For those who exalt rationality and downgrade emotions, there is reason to reconsider: Which is more basic to human nature?