The holes in our hearts

My grandmother was not happy that I left home in pursuit of adventure in places far away from home. She wondered why I would go to places where I could not even have home-cooked Roti and Dal. After all, at the end of the day, this is what one consumes irrespective of how fancy the day was.

She had a point, but I did not stay. I wanted adventure and I wanted to see the world. So did many of the folks I knew. But it always made me wonder. How do people decide to do something and not something else? Why is that some people get on a boat to go find the North Pole while others build a nest to protect their families? Why do people do what they do?

It is certainly not rational. Our rational brain is a very recently developed layer on top of our emotional brain, which in turn layers on top of our instinctual reptilian brain. If I feel threatened by someone, I am going to get into flight or fight mode. The fancy emotions and rational mind won't even get the chance to get engaged. I see a snake and I run. If a marketer can evoke emotions from me, he has me on the hook. This is how we constantly buy expensive phones, cars, clothes, and bags. The rational neocortex again does not even get the chance to get involved in making those decisions. It seems we are hot emotional wrecks at the mercy of our hardwired reptilian logic at times and limbic brain at other times. Our rational brain is relegated to justifications after the decisions are already made. Something needs to be done to soothe our ego.

This is a crazy situation. We got no control and no free will if we let it be. It takes less than a second for us to decide whether or not we like someone. When I buy that car or choose that home, or purchase that table, or decide on that school, it is the layers and layers of emotional carvings, stored in the limbic brain, speaking.

And the whole emotional makeup of our brain itself seems all chemistry. We have a soup of Testosterone, Dopamine, Oxytocin, and others in our head. I had a small experiment with this chemistry and it changed the way I thought for almost a week. I was a different person. It is scary and humbling. Our emotional state is mostly a series of accidents, it seems like. You do anything to increase the Dopamine in your brain and you start craving that activity. You lift weights to spike Testosterone and your confidence suddenly surges to the next level. Play with the Oxytocin and you are an emotional wreck craving that emotional warmth. Maybe it is actually the hormonal balance that decides our personalities, as far as most of the practical life decisions are concerned. Everyone has their own hormonal balance that makes their emotional personalities. The question is how do we reach a certain unique hormonal balance, that defines "me" of our personalities.

It is our emotional history. Where did we grow up? How were our relationships with our siblings and parents? What did we crave growing? You wanted more time with your parents, maybe a bit more respect in the class or maybe fancier clothing that the kid from the neighborhood. All of this is etched in the emotional brain. Rockefeller grew up poor with no certainties of family life. His father was a scam artist. He must have gotten part of that from his parents. But he fought hard against it, never letting poverty and uncertainties of life engulf his own life. His job in accounting and his business empire must have given him that solace. We all carry Jungian Shadows, but we never accept it as part of ourselves. We may be ashamed of it and fight hard against it. Sometimes we fight it all our lives. These are strong emotions and they are not going away. They shape our "emotional brain", over the years carving how and when we feel love, pain, shame, anger when something happens to us. We have little control over it. The output comes even if it has no connection to reality.

Life decisions are the long list of actions we take to soothe ourselves. Sometimes we are able to and reach peace. The holes in our hearts are filled and the tensions are released. I know of people who spend all their lives making sure they win the approval of their parents, which was always in short supply growing up. Some others spend their lives accumulating  "pride" and "security" that was denied growing up. They have cars, houses, money and they splurge it so that everyone knows that they have it. Some others go directly to the source of the problem and try to douse the constant pain with drugs, albeit only temporarily.

Also, this is not limited to people. It also pertains to society and countries. BJP in India spending millions of dollars to make statues and taking strong actions against the national slights from Pakistan. The emotional reaction for this is visceral, both in support of and against. It makes sense. A large number of Indians carry emotional wounds of being conquered. BJP is helping fill it with the "56-inch chest" of Modi. There cannot be any rational debate on these matters. That would be neocortex. Here decisions are already made in the limbic brain. I feel the same is playing out in the USA with Trump with the background of exporting manufacturing jobs to China in the heartland of the USA. When Germany lost in the first world war and had obscene penalties to pay, it was easy for someone like Hitler to capitalize on the shame and claim to be the superior race.

Growing up, I thought hard about what I should do with life. That question is still open, though I have already spent quite a bit of it. In the meantime, though, I think why I do what I do is becoming clear. I could answer the question my grandmother asked. Roti could fill the stomach but not the memories of visceral experiences of being away from home, where I always have had my best childhood experiences. And it is a hole with no bottom.