Feeling Nice

Feelings
Feelings are wretched barometers of reality, but more especially, they are terrible aides at discerning right from wrong. I can feel a certain way, positively or negatively, about a certain idea, activity or thing. My feelings are unable to produce the actual concrete truth about the thing, fact or idea, they are a merely an accumulation of past feelings and experiences interpreted through memories. Memories not being amoung the more reliable sources of information known to man. I like feelings, they sure can be fun, but beyond helping me to figure out how I personally feel about a certain event, they are not helpful.

Why the diatribe you ask? Because I hear constantly in the media, in commercials, in conversations around me that doing such and such was great cause "it made me feel good." That's cool if it was the right, moral, good, healthy correct thing to do. What about when doing the wrong, immoral, irresponsible, reprehensible and possibly criminal thing makes you feel really good? Will you still do that for that reason? I'm asking because unless you have a highly evolved sense of honor and a deeply ingrained code of conduct, doing the wrong thing usually feels REALLY good. Which is why we choose to do the wrong thing in the first place, it's because we want to.

Doing what is right involves much more than feelings. Often it invovles going against our inclinations and desires to feed our pleasure senses, it involves sacrifice. Doing what is good should be more satisfying that just doing what "feels good", but these days you won't get many agreeing with you.

Just so you are warned, if you are sitting with me watching TV and a certain commercial selling custom blinds comes on and a certain salesgirl who "feels really good when that man said thank you for selling me those blinds", don't mind me if I throw something and scream.

Nice
I despise how misused this word is, how often I am expected to be nice when no one can define what being a "nice" person is. I can be kind or mean, nasty or considerate, compassionate or cruel, but being a "nice" person is undefineable, everyone has their own definition, which renders that description useless. You can have nice toes, meaning attractive, a nice home, nice lawn, but you yourself can only be described by character terms. All that to say, I'm not nice.