Doing What Feels Good and Doing What Is Good

Hello and welcome to rewilding philosophy, your newsletter about ^ekophilosophical health for our times or in other words: life advice, but with values.

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You are probably familiar with the following image.

Which of these two lines is longer?

The intuitive answer is that the first line is obviously longer.

But that’s wrong. Both of them are the same length.

It’s called the Müller-Lyer illusion.

Your wisdom has to go against your instincts. The right answer is what feels wrong.

When McDonald's opened, people loved it. They weren't thinking about its potential unhealthiness. Same with cigarettes. Same with plastic.

At one point in history, these things were celebrated as great successes for humanity. Negative consequences were not only ignored but simply unknown.

Our instincts told us those things were good.

In an ideal world, what feels good would be what is good. Laying on the couch and eating potato chips would make our bodies strong, going on a weekend trip to Bali would save the planet, and working on creative projects would provide a high income.

Unfortunately, this is not the world most of us find ourselves in. More often than not, what feels good contrasts with what is actually good for us (and others).

While many of us have accepted that lying on the couch all day and eating potato chips won't get us where we want to be in life, we haven't reached the same conclusion about planetary and environmental concerns.

We resist the idea that we shouldn't always be comfortable and do what we want to do. Especially something that is not to our own benefit or that of our immediate surroundings, like our family, but something that mostly stays abstract - such as “the environment”, unknown species in the Amazon or the next generations.

Our instincts are misleading when it comes to our own well-being, and even more so when it comes to the well-being of abstract beings not in our immediate vicinity—in space and time.

Simply being guided by what feels good, which exceptions like to do, is insufficient. We need knowledge, wisdom and tools to identify what actually is good. In the case above, it’s a ruler that helps us measure the length of the line.