 We almost always have competing goals. I'm not saying rationality doesn't exist. I'm saying rationality is not the absence of feeling emotion. Rationality is not the absence of feeling, it can't be. That's impossible actually anatomically. Your brain is always regulating your body, the systems in your body. That's its most important job. That's why we have brains because we have big complicated bodies that with a lot of moving parts that have to be integrated and coordinated in a metabolically efficient way. And your body is always sending sense data back to your brain about the state of the body. Because your brain doesn't know. Your brain is trapped in a dark silent box, your skull. It has no idea what's going on in the body. It has no idea what's going on in the world. It only knows, it only finds out things through the sensory surfaces of the body. Your retina in your eyes, your cochlea in your ears and so on and information that's making its way up the vagus nerve and other nerve pathways up the spinal cord. And these sense data that your brain receives are the outcomes of some changes but your brain doesn't get the cause. It only knows the outcome. So it has to guess at the causes, right? Because a flash of light or a loud bang, like a loud bang could be a door slamming. It could be thunder outside. It could be a gunshot. And what your brain has to prepare you to do is different in those three cases. Similarly, if you have an ache in your chest, that ache could be that there's a lot of uncertainty and your heart is racing. It could be that you just ate a big meal and you've got indigestion. It could be the beginnings of a heart attack. I mean, your brain doesn't know. Your brain has to guess. And the point is that your brain's receiving always sense data from the body and your brain makes that data available to consciousness as simple feelings, feeling pleasant, feeling unpleasant, feeling comfortable, feeling uncomfortable, feeling worked up, feeling calm. These simple feelings are not emotions but they're always with you, 24 seven, always. So that means you're never without feeling. When you're driving on the highway or I won't say you, when I'm driving on the highway and somebody cuts me off and I think, what an asshole? I'm not saying that for your feeling. There's feeling there, but we experience feeling. I experience feeling in that moment as if it's embedded in the person I'm perceiving. Like the asshole-ness is really that person, right? As opposed to my brain is actually creating this feeling. And so I think this is a really good example. There may be other reasons for why that person cut me off on the highway that I'm not considering. And maybe that person is late for an appointment. Maybe that person is rushing someone to the hospital. Maybe that person didn't actually see me. And there are a lot of reasons that that could have happened. And rationality in part is about considering alternatives, let's say, and not just going with the first experience that you have, the first impression that you have. Rationality is also really tied, I think to, so it's not tied to the absence of feeling, but it's definitely tied to doing things with the amount of energy that you actually have. So what I mean by that is our brain is kind of running a budget for our body. That's a metaphor for what your brain is doing. One of the things your brain is doing is trying to balance the intake of energy and the output of energy. Everything costs some energy, everything you do, everything you think, everything you learn, every experience you have costs something metabolically. And rationality, you could also think of it as, so for example, we look at someone who is depressed or who is anxious as being not rational and in fact, actually the dominant view of depression is that you have overactive emotion circuits in your brain and underactive cognitive control, underactive rationality. Well, you don't have emotion circuits in your brain, no animal has emotion circuits in their brain and there are no circuits for rationality. Another way to think about what depression is is a bankrupt body budget. That there are real serious metabolic problems, a person who is depressed is basically has, there are metabolic issues that cause people to have no energy to stop exercising, stop moving, stop engaging with people around them to kind of go with their beliefs instead of trying to forage for new information or paying attention to what's going on around them. And that's actually a rational thing to do. It's rational to stop spending when you're running a deficit. And yeah, and the most expensive thing your brain can do really is move your body, like literally move your limbs, that's expensive. And also learning something new turns out to be metabolically expensive. So if you stop, if you withdraw and you stop moving and you lose motivation to do things, that's actually, it's like in a way that's sort of not spending, it's becoming frugal. Yeah, conserving. Yeah, so depression, we think of as a mental illness and that there's something wrong with the person's rationality, but I would say the symptoms of depression are perfectly rational way to deal with a body budget deficit. And the problem actually that needs to be solved is not an absence of rationality, it's a problem with metabolism. Yeah, and this makes so much sense because for everybody, if they're having any sort of issues, the first thing that you wanna look at is that triad of how are you sleeping, what are you eating and what sort of exercise you are getting because that helps process your metabolism and what you're eating and making sure that all that energy is getting spent in the proper manner. And if you're not sleeping correctly, if you're not eating properly, if you're not getting exercise, well, all of that energy that is coming in is going to the wrong places or is reserved for places that is not getting the proper sleep exercise and diet.