A Three-Step Guide to Being Free from Your Emotional Life

Emotions are like mosquitoes. There really is no reason why they exist except to annoy us. That's why I've decided to tell you the secret to unleashing your potential as a rational human being.

In this short post, I'm going to give you a foolproof plan for separating yourself from the world of your emotions. It's not easy, but the reward is worth it: a peaceful, meaningless, gray existence where nothing matters and nothing touches your heart.

(1) Believe that you can stop feeling something, if you want to.

Meditation is a great way to condition yourself to believe this. By subscribing to the tenets of Buddhist ideology, you can alter the way that you interpret your own emotional life. If you get really good at it, you can stop feeling controlled by your emotions. They might still control your behavior, but you will have totally numbed yourself to their influence that you perceive yourself to be totally free---enlightened, even. And that's what we're aiming for: a numbness to emotion that we can justify to ourselves as an advantage.

(2) Believe that emotions only last as long as you feel them.

Thanks to our rational faculties, this one is not too hard to believe. It's intuitive, after all; our lives consist largely of our conscious experiences; therefore, if we're not feeling sad, how could we have sadness? The goal of believing that emotions are transient things that pass with their conscious appearance is twofold: one, we feel a sense of release from our emotions, which makes us feel free and powerful (and who doesn't want that?); second, we gain the conviction that we can ignore our emotions entirely, because they will be different tomorrow.

Depressed? Don't worry about it. You might feel happy tomorrow.

Anxious? Probably doesn't matter. Just ignore it.

This way, we can make decisions based on reasons alone, unfettered by the fickleness of the heart.

(3) Believe that emotions can't affect your behavior if you deny them.

Man, would it be terribly inconvenient if emotions controlled us even if we channeled all our rational powers and plowed through them. Imagine a world where racist prejudices prevented you from befriending people of other backgrounds even though you don't believe that you are a racist. That would throw a wrench into your sense of autonomy like nothing else. In order to feel like you're in control of your life, it's essential---ESSENTIAL---to think that denying your emotions actually blocks them from having an effect on your behavior. 

Now it's your turn! Time to say goodbye to emotions.

My advice to everyone out there who struggles with emotions is just to cut yourself off from them. Maybe you will do things that you don't quite understand and you will feel like a walking corpse, but at least you won't be burdened by uncomfortable feelings.

Good luck!