happiness

When I was younger, I believed in god and heaven. Sometimes I thought that if I didn't believe in god and heaven, then there would be no point to life, and I may as well kill myself. I was worried about this when I became not religious, but I discovered that I still didn't want to kill myself, and life was still interesting.

Now I think there's a similar issue with emotions and happiness. I think sometimes that if I didn't have emotions and happiness, then there would be no point to life, and I may as well kill myself. And I worry about this at times when I'm depressed or frustrated and think it may be easier to not be so emotional. And so instead, I typically cherish and cultivate my emotions.

However, I was in a pretty non-emotional frame of mind today, and I saw the scene above, and I found it interesting and beautiful. That is to say, the intelligent non-emotional part of my brain liked the scene, with no help from the emotional part of my brain.

This spurred a couple thoughts:

1. Maybe a lot of the values we associate with emotions, like peace and kindness, are also aesthetically beautiful from a purely intellectual point of view.

2. Maybe a purely rational person, unencumbered by emotion, would still make decisions in line with these virtues.

I think the common stereotype of a purely rational person is that they are cold, heartless and selfish. Such a person will sacrifice other people for personal gain.

However, what personal gain are we talking about? A purely rational person has no emotions, so they're not trying to gain happiness. They won't care about fame, money or power, at least not for their own sake. They might care about money or power as a means to an end, but what end? They don't care about buying stuff that will make them happy, or showing off their power, because they don't care about that sort of thing.

My current guess is that a purely rational person will be seeking some sort of beauty.