Does There Exist An Emotion That Is Completely Useless That We Should Always Completely Ignore Rather Than Let It Guide Our Choices?
The one candidate for such an emotion that comes to my mind is envy. I cannot imaging how feeling bad about someone else having something valuable can motivate any constructive behavior. Let's say someone is wealthier than you, has better adjusted children than you, has a better spouse than you or doing better than you in any number of ways. How does it help you in life to feel bad about that? Or worse, how does it help you to harbor ill will toward that person because of their better lot in comparison to you?
I can understand that whenever there is a zero-sum competition over a strictly limited resource like sex partners in a small group of people or the attention of one's parents among one's siblings can give rise to envy. But what good does it do to feel bad about someone else's fortune? Feeling pain because someone is succeeding at achieving their life goals is counterproductive because it directs attention from possibilities for growth and development toward destruction.
Are there any other such emotions that serve no constructive purpose? Do you agree on the uselessness of envy?
I was going to say jealousy. Hate is also not a very good driver of behavior.
If you have no capacity for jealousy whatsoever, then you will not be motivated to mate guard at all. At a low level, jealousy can have a useful function because it may motivate you to cast suspicion on your mate if there really is something off about their behavior. Fear of one's spouse's reactions (motivated by jealousy) may in some instances motivate oneself to push away from temptation.
Anger is a useful and healthy reaction to one's boundaries being violated. Hatred is prolonged anger. Hatred may motivate a person to take revenge. Some form of payback for wrongdoing against you to instill fear into those who consider the possibility of walking over you can be necessary. But hatred is a very dangerous feeling to be consumed by.
I can see some benefit in the jealousy in that case, however I still think it does far more harm then good and is also easy to leverage - like in the movies :)
hatred is ingrained and is a type of automatic response to stimulus, it stops curiosity.
!ENGAGE 25
ENGAGEtokens.if you look at it from an evolutionary point of view, all of our emotions are beneficial to our survival, otherwise the emotions that are not beneficial would not survive.
But, many people today acquire all their base needs with money. They don't grow their own food, they don't make their own clothes, they don't build their own house. Because of this, there are probably some emotions and instincts inside of us that are left unused or unrefined. Envy may actually be a product of this newer way of living where we acquire all things through money and transaction. If we provided for all our own needs instead of through money, we would be so proud of our own handiwork and so busy just trying to survive that envy would have a hard time existing. But when the only thing people can be proud of is in how much stuff they have, then its hard to be satisfied for more than a moment.
Yes, all of our emotions may have been beneficial for us at some point. But which parts of our psychological makeup are adaptations and which of them are byproducts that continue to exist because they don't get too much in the way of survival and reproduction?