I was interested to read this forum and I liked everyone's thoughts on it. I wrote an essay for school on this exact topic. It's kind of long but its concise(actually there are probably some parts that could be shortened a bit.) I thought I would post it just in case anyone was interested, and I would also really like to know what people think of it, thanks!
When asking how ought we to live I think there are two underlying factors that play a key role. These most naturally being thought and feelings. How we live is based on the decisions we make, and the decisions we make are based on our thought and feelings. Many people base their decisions mainly on how they feel about a subject. I think it is better to ignore your feelings and base decisions completely on thought.
Feelings are a trait of humans that have remained with us through evolution from our animal ancestors. An animal does not rationally think about a situation before it acts. Rather, I believe a feeling is produced and it wants to act accordingly to satisfy the feeling. For example, when a territorial dog sees another animal intruding on it's property the dog gets angry. It acts on this anger in the most natural way which is to bark or attack until the animal leaves and the angry feeling diminishes. Many people attribute animal behavior to pure instinct, as if the dog is similiar to a robot in that is just programmed to know to chase the animal away. Instead, I believe that a certain feeling is impulsively produced and the only instinctive aspect is that the animal knows how to act accordingly in response to that feeling.
As ape-like humans came about through evolution, a more sophisticated property called thought began to develop. Tasks such as staying away from predators and gathering food are animal-type functions that would have been learned by chance through using their bodies in natural ways in response to their feelings. Tasks which include extensions past the use of just their own bodies would not have been as likely to be learned by chance. For example, creating and using tools and weapons had to have required some thought. Thought continually became more sophisticated as they advanced in their interactions in things such as language, mathematics, and religion. Feelings remained equally dominant as thought evolved, since in most cases, feelings overall still caused people to act in whatever way would make them most likely to survive.
People often times base their decisons on feelings. When there is a situation where a decision is needed a certain feeling about the topic arises. Some people will follow that immediate feeling and make their decision based on it. It is important not to do so because the way one feels about a situation is the product of millions of years of evolution in a competition for survival. For example, greed, anger, and jealousy are existent merely because the people who have posessed them have been the most likely ones to survive. Most people veer away from displaying blatant greed. However, if there were truly no greed in the world, people would share until all the possessions were equally divided. With anger, there are many situations where people get angry at someone or something that either was a mistake or no one's fault at all, and consequently make a harmful decision based on those feelings. Jealousy, is most fundamentally an attitude of "either it will be mine, or no one's at all." The first part about "it will be mine" causes someone who feels inferior in some way to desire a superior aspect that another person has. If the jealous person suceeds and obtains that aspect, he becomes more likely to survive. The "or no one's at all" part means the jealous person either wants that superior aspect for himself or does not want anyone to have it. If he doesn't have it for himself but instead suceeds in causing no one at all to have it, then he has at least equalized his chances of survival with his rivals. All of these traits can purely be seen as traits left over from the competition for survival. For this reason, we should not follow our feelings, they merely direct us to selfishly ensure our own survival. Instead, we should follow the more sophisticated process of rational thought when trying make a decision, since it originally developed as a better way to help us decide how to do things.
I believe we should only ignore our feelings in the decision making process, not in life as a whole. Feelings are an incredible property that we cannot artificially create. They give life it's meaning and enjoyment. What we feel is the product of whatever made us most likely to survive before we were able to rationally think. Now that we have developed the ability to think, we should only use feelings to our advantage and full enjoyment. Negative feelings are not enjoyable and they no longer help us in any way as long we are able to judge what is negative for ourself. For this reason, we should completely ignore our negative feelings as best we can and fully welcome and indulge in the enjoyable, positive feelings. This doesn't mean to keep negative feelings about a situation tightly bottled up inside. Instead, rationalize that this negative situation happend either by chance or because someone was mindlessly following their feelings instead of thinking. Realize that letting it bother you only hurts you more, learn from it, let it go, and then continue living in the most positive way possible.
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