Rational and Emotional

Before starting: last month I wrote sth about, but not refined enough to make it public.

Today’s topic is quite daily. Starting from a tiny thinking that I had, I realized that a very interesting topic for blog posts can be self-knowledge.

What happened was that, my friend invited me to join the night-run group. The welcome activity for the new semester was a meal after the run. Below are the thinking processes that I had.

The food and drink are BBQ+Mixue, which is a crazy combo I cannot accept. (Diet+Smoke). Then can I choose to escape after running? Doesn’t seem like a good idea, because it’s kinda being too special, no matter if I explain my personal reasons or not. Do others really care? While, I am not caring about it that much, it’s really kind of trade-off. I can choose to not go, because it’s all right to not join the welcome activity.

This is not a very complex scenario, but I might have too much thinking about it. It’s not about I care about others’ opinions, instead, I might be too rational. When speaking of the trade-off, I really want to be able to “evaluate” every situation in whatever scenario.

Interestingly, even if being considered as unemotional by many people, my self-knowledge (by personal relection or by tests like MBTI) shows that my rational side is not dominant. I did seldom show my emotional side, which is well-known when I was playing Go (Weiqi) during my childhood (I’m the one those other kids’ parents cannot tell if I won or lost after the game). Another reason might be that most people are not that rational, so I become “too rational” in comparison.

Both emotion and rationality are important. Even if I want to be rational for most cases, it’s true that many people are enjoying the emotional side of life. For example, Dr. Chester from UHC was praising me greatly when I did nothing but following the instructions of the medicine. That’s a time when I felt like, “Well, even if I don’t buy it, I can tell many people do.” And the doctor did left a “friendly” impression on me, so I might somehow buy it?

This topic is really I would like to track myself for long time, because any daily scenario can be a case study.For example, trading relies a lot on the balance between rationality and emotion: many traders are emotionally driven, which is unavoidable to some extent because it’s like the fun part of trading. My personal trading strategy is very rational, but recently I start to suspect that adding some emotional factors might help, at least to make the trading more sustainable (comparing to behave like a robot).