Was it the picture that caused you to click? Good. Analyze that.
What feelings did it produce? Where in your body did you feel that sensation? Does the feeling feel good or bad?
Did the feeling trigger any thoughts, judgements, or biases? Did you register the feeling at all?
Why do you think I'm asking these questions, and how do you feel about them?
I'm on my second listen of Why Buddhism Is True by Robert Wright. It's a book about Buddhist philosophy and how it applies to real life. It's also about the benefits and practical applications of mindfulness meditation.
About That Tape Measure
In Why Buddhism Is True, the author tells the tale of a hypothetical tape measure at an auction. The crowd is told that it belonged to JFK. What do you think that did for the value of a simple tape measure?
The auction ensues and the tape measure goes to the highest bidder, except the winner is told that there was a mistake. The tape measure actually belonged to an unknown carpenter, and they'll send them JFK's tape measure later.
What do you think happened to that tape measure's value in the eye of the auction winner? Or how about a Picasso that turns out to be a fake, or fool's gold thought to be real, or counterfeit diamonds, or even a cheap drink with an expensive label slapped on?
Our perception of value usually comes from how we feel about it -- not its inherent utility.
A fake Picasso has lost its value not because it didn't provide the same utility (after all, if it could pass as real, it looks like the original). It lost its value because the feeling associated with the original is what people would pay handsomely for.
Think about it. If a fake Picasso and the real Picasso painting provides the same utility, yet only the original would fetch hundreds of thousands to over a million dollars, what actually makes it that valuable?
The feeling of owning an original Picasso, and the open market value of other people's feelings of owning a real Picasso.
The Eye of the Beholder
While it can be said that humans have predictable attraction and relationship patterns, outliers do occur.
For example, a young, highly attractive woman would likely seek a high value, high status man with abundant resources and an affluent lifestyle. No surprises there.
And that same high value man would typically not settle for a woman he deems to be below his threshold for youth, beauty, and her ability to be sexually gratifying. You could say that these are biological drives that have been hard-wired into us by evolution, and I would agree.
But what about the relationships that don't follow this predictable pattern?
What if a couple seems mismatched in terms of looks, status, or income?
What if their relationship leaves people secretly thinking, "Can't so-and-so do better?" Perhaps they can if personalities, childhoods, traumas, and self-awareness were entirely removed from the equation, but humans are highly complex.
We end up with the people that make us feel the way we want to. Even if the script does run predictably, and the high status man does end up with the young, attractive woman. It can be said that feelings have played the main role there, too.
It may be our storybook version of "love," or it could be the feelings each partner gets from having the other at their side. The man could value the looks he gets from his high-status colleagues, and she could enjoy eliciting the cloaked envy of her peers.
Perhaps she grew up in a lower middle class neighborhood and values the feeling of security her partner affords her. Perhaps he values the feeling of being with a woman who allows him to feel like he truly "made it."
Or, perhaps they both feel relaxed in the idea that they're with each others' best possible option in the dating pool.
The Battle Within
Perhaps the most challenging aspect of dating and relating is the battle between our animal instincts, or what Wright refers to as "natural selection," and our spiritual or conscious selves.
The parts that believe in shared interests, compatibility, and the genuine enjoyment of each other's company.
The question is always the same. Can a man forgo pure reproductive signals in a woman: youth, beauty, waist to hip ratio, height, and motherly temperament?
And similarly, can a woman forgo signals from a man as a protector, provider, carrier of good genes, social status, height, and fatherly temperament?
Can we bypass our drive to always search for our best possible option in favor of commitment, and that deeply misunderstood emotion, "love?"
What we've been calling "falling in love" is one of the most powerful feelings in which decisions, good and bad, have been based on.
Vegas weddings after dating for three weeks. Expenditures of money, time, and resources. Long trips to be together, and a host of other story-worthy endeavors, all accomplished on the cloud of "love."
We now understand this early stage of emotion as "limerence," and after a relationship has solidified, we've come to understand that next feeling as "attachment."
Real love remains a mystery, particularly the "true love" spoken about in romance novels and movies. By and large, it's usually portrayed as one's valuing someone else's life more than our own, and it typically involves some heroic sacrifice.
Jack's decision to put Rose on the flotation device while he descends to the icy depths as a human icicle.
If that's the case, then "true love" is far more temporary than we thought. However, some movies portray true love as something that lasts until old age, and no one sees the conflicts, the arguments, and the struggles that take place between the falling in love and the growing old together.
On the flip side, feelings of disgust, anger, resentment, pity, and a host of other emotions can present another danger: the dissolution of relationships at any stage.
Internal triggers, preferences, conflicting love languages, attachment styles, and communication styles to name a few. Once a beloved partner, a person can slowly turn into the annoying roommate in a relationship where sex has dried up and the feelings of being in love are replaced with a wall of bitterness and contempt.
How do people who were so in love get there? Feelings got them there. The same mechanism that built the relationship eventually dismantled it.
Spiritual Animals
Spirituality, in many ways, as Wright points out in Why Buddhism Is True, is the bypassing of biological programming in favor of a more conscious path. For almost two decades we've had social media and dating apps, plus the internet's global reach in finding newer and newer partners.
And that global reach has made the battle between our biology and our consciousness that much harder to win.
Natural selection doesn't care about your relationship. It cares about replication. It cares about novelty. It cares about spreading genes as widely and effectively as possible.
Every swipe on a dating app is a small hit of dopamine, a tiny signal from your biology saying, "There might be a better option out there." And in a world where options are literally endless, that signal never shuts off.
This is where spirituality, or at the very least mindfulness, becomes useful. Not in the way that many people misuse it, though.
There's a version of "spiritual growth" that's really just a dressed-up form of self-victimization, where a person convinces themselves that because they've meditated a few times and read a couple of books, they've somehow transcended their human nature.
That they're "above" their biological drives, and anyone who hasn't reached their level of enlightenment is operating on a lower frequency.
That's not what this is about. That kind of thinking is just as unconscious as blindly following your impulses. It's the ego wearing a spiritual costume.
What Wright and Buddhist philosophy actually point to is something far more practical. It's the ability to notice.
To notice that you felt a surge of attraction and to pause before acting on it.
To notice that you're angry at your partner and to recognize that the anger may be rooted in something from your childhood rather than what they just said.
To notice that you've been scanning dating apps not because your relationship is failing, but because your biology is restless and looking for novelty.
The key word there is "notice."
Not suppress. Not judge. Not override your biology and become some passionless, detached version of yourself. That's what a lot of people get wrong. They hear "spiritual growth" and think it means becoming a pushover.
Becoming the person who never asserts themselves, never wants anything, never competes. That's not consciousness. That's just a different form of unconsciousness, one where a person has swung so far from their animal instincts that they've abandoned their own needs entirely.
I see this constantly in my work. Men who've spent years people-pleasing, avoiding conflict, and suppressing their own desires because they believed that being "nice" was the path to love and approval.
What they really did was abandon themselves. And when they discover that this pattern hasn't been serving them, the temptation is to swing to the other extreme, to become cold, strategic, transactional, or exit the dating marketplace entirely.
While the latter may seem like consciousness at play, much of it is still driven by emotion. Disney visions of love are replaced with anger, bitterness, and resentment.
The real work, and I mean the actual difficult, unglamorous, daily work, is in developing an acute awareness of what's driving you in any given moment.
Is this decision coming from your biology? From a wound? From contempt? From genuine clarity? And once you've identified the source, you get to choose. Not react. Choose.
That's the difference. A man who understands his biological pull toward youth and beauty doesn't have to shame himself for it.
And a woman who understands her pull toward status and security doesn't have to shame herself for it either.
Both drives are equally hardwired, equally valid, and equally capable of leading someone somewhere they don't actually want to go if left unexamined. The point isn't that one drive is noble and the other is shallow.
The point is that neither drive has to run the show.
Spirituality, when it's practiced honestly, doesn't ask you to kill your instincts. It asks you to stop being unconscious about them. And the moment you bring awareness to an impulse, it loses a significant amount of its power over you.
Not all of it. You're still human. But enough that you can make a decision rather than simply being carried along by a feeling. And it also means being ruthlessly honest about when you're using spirituality as a shield.
When "I'm just on a higher frequency" is really code for "I'm afraid of not being enough."
When "I don't need a relationship to be happy" is really code for "I've given up."
When "I'm focused on my spiritual journey" is really code for "I'm avoiding the hard work of intimacy."
Awareness has to include awareness of your own self-deception, or it's just another blind spot wearing a nicer outfit.
Conclusion
If you zoom out far enough, you start to see that humans don't just have feelings, we form entire identities around them. We build patterns of emotional experience that we return to again and again because they feel familiar.
And familiar doesn't mean good. It means known.
The person who grew up feeling like a failure will unconsciously seek out situations that confirm that feeling.
They'll sabotage a promotion. They'll pick a partner who makes them feel small. They'll interpret neutral events as evidence that they're not enough.
Not because they want to feel like a failure, but because that feeling is home. It's the emotional state their nervous system learned to organize around, and the body will return to what it knows, even when what it knows is painful.
The same is true on the other end. Someone who grew up feeling like a leader, like someone who wins, will seek out situations that reinforce that identity.
They'll take risks. They'll compete. They'll frame setbacks as temporary. The feeling of winning is their baseline, and their decisions will orient around protecting it.
This is where the tape measure and the Picasso and the relationships all connect.
The value we assign to things, to people, to experiences, is rarely about the thing itself. It's about the feeling the thing produces in us, and whether that feeling matches the identity we've built for ourselves.
A man doesn't just choose a partner. He chooses the feeling that partner gives him, and whether that feeling aligns with who he believes himself to be.
A woman doesn't just fall in love. She falls into a feeling, and that feeling either confirms or disrupts the emotional identity she's been carrying since childhood.
This is why two people can look at the same relationship and see completely different things. One person sees security. The other sees a cage. One person sees passion. The other sees chaos. Same relationship, different feeling identities interpreting it.
And this is why the work of becoming conscious, of practicing mindfulness, of examining your biological and emotional programming, matters so much.
Because if you don't know what feeling you're chasing, you can't know why you're making the choices you're making.
You'll think you're choosing a partner when you're really choosing a feeling. You'll think you're building a career when you're really trying to prove something to a parent who never acknowledged you.
You'll think you're pursuing happiness when you're really just trying to return to a familiar emotional state, even if that state is suffering.
The feelings came first. They always do. The tape measure's value was never about the tape measure. The Picasso's value is less about the painting and more about the feeling of owning it.
And your life's direction has little to do with the things you think it's about.
And once you see that clearly, once you truly register it in your body the same way I asked you to at the top of this post, you gain something that most people never access: the ability to choose among the feelings.