Engineered Emotion

 Which of the two words in this title do you most identify with? Are you someone who gets nervous when your body gets very aware of an an upcoming situation?.. or does your initial thought go to anticipation of something exciting and invigorating? Subconscious Response -> Conscious Decision Our bodies will subconsciously respond. When we see any conditions forming that mean something consequential is about to happen, our subconscious brain has a programmed response. This initial response to a trigger condition is consistent for each of us and it's pretty difficult for us to control. For me, I admit that 90% of the time when my body starts responding to a future event my feelings turn to nervous anxiety rather than excited anticipation. Others I know will more often respond with excited anticipation as a default response. Every person has a different subconscious nature. This response mechanism happens relatively often as I live my life. Certain conditions will just trigger a fe...

  Being an engineer has taught me important analytical skills to sort ideas and concepts into categories. This black and white approach is compellingly simple, but can it be sustained. Binary Thinking: So much of my world view is rooted in a framework of truth. Things are either in or they're out. The laws of classical physics are in, and books of science fiction, may be fun to think about, but are clearly not in the truth framework. Early in my life these things were categorized on my behalf and for the most part I didn't question them. When life became complicated my framework became much less stable. Over time there was a growing third category of things that I couldn't easily figure out. My assumption was that each item in this 3rd category of things is actually in or out but I haven't quite figured out which one it is. Not knowing how to categorize something is quite stressful and thinking about it consumed a tremendous amount of energy. A big part of my mental hea...