By Mr. Maverick,

Our daily lives constitute an ever-ending decision making process. I made a calculated decision to invest some time and communicate my thoughts through this article – and you, dear reader, made another (well-?)calculated decision to take some time out of your busy schedule and read this article which you probably found intriguing. From deciding what to wear and buying that extra candy bar at the grocery store, to making a life-changing investment like buying a house, we are constantly facing dilemmas that demand decisions, either swift or measured.

Deciding about anything knows two modes of operation, as the infamous professor Daniel Kahneman outlined in the 2011 bestseller Thinking, Fast and Slow. System 1 operates swiftly and effortlessly, and it usually provides us with the wrong choices. System 2 demands concentration, motivation and the application of acquired knowledge, and it usually leads to right choices. Of course, the distinction is not anatomical; it depicts two distinct modes of operation which involve various brain sectors. In short, System 1 means snap decision or impulse; System 2 means considering and reconsidering before buying that candy bar.

A well-known philosopher of Western thought, David Hume, once stated that “reason is, and ought only to be the slave of passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them.” However, almost always and especially nowadays, it is generally accepted that the passions or emotions need to obey reason. We usually avoid hotheads, regret plenty of thoughtless outbursts and beg people to be reasonable in various arguments. On the other hand, it often feels great in the heat of the moment to yell and swear on someone who has just crossed us, but our cooler head prompts us to remain calm in order to feel even greater in the long run. The question nowadays is, is it feasible to nullify emotion, especially in this decision-making loop that our daily life is?

Nowadays, there is a “Hypermania” that seems to delineate perfectly the spirit of our age. The prefix “hyper” is used everywhere on a daily basis, expressing a sense of excess and demonstrating an emotionally charged ambience. We often hear hyper-this, hyper-that. Hyper-responsive, hyper-reactive, hyperinflation, hyperactivity, hyper-realism, hyperbole, hypersensitive and so on and so forth. Over, above and beyond are a few synonyms of this Greek-rooted prefix, and we can gather by its extensive use nowadays a highly emotional portrayal of things. The more excess, the more charge there is in our words, the more we deviate from reason and the more we approach an emotional, visceral reaction.

Hyperinformation is yet another notable use of this prefix. It means an excess of information that leads over time to an information overload. If you turn the TV on right now, you will probably see either images of cities in ruins, desperate people in need of help across the world, or hot-tempered political debates and various acts of injustice domestically and/or internationally. In other words, there is a flood of information that is presented to you, us, in a way that triggers automatically an emotional response.

The truth is that, according to many neuroscientists, emotional decision-making is what the human brain wants to do. The brain is intrinsically very conservative of its energy, and a snap emotional response to things equals less cognitive process, less calories and less time. The brain has a natural proclivity to skip all that thorough analysis and contextualizing and synthesis and information vetting. It likes to rapidly jump to conclusions. The problem, however, is that everything in our lives, especially scrolling on Instagram among many things, is built to trigger an emotional response.

All this doesn’t mean that we should offset emotion in our brains. After all, we literally can’t make decisions without emotions. If we selectively damage the area of the brain that’s in charge of emotions, the limbic system, we won’t be able to make a decision, because without the ability to process emotion, in other words to push in one direction or another, we wouldn’t be capable to conclude and, eventually, act.

The velocity and volume of information, both in terms of noise and mass, in our already fast-paced societies, certainly magnifies confusion, blurs our vision and messes with our rational reasoning. What is more, the emotionally charged content that we consume in huge amounts on a daily basis, ineluctably pushes us to develop a predisposition towards an emotionally prone thinking process. So right now, the current is flowing toward emotion, rather than reason in our societies. Admittedly, rationality has been the basic impetus behind the evolution of humankind and as the famous cognitive psychologist Steven Pinker wrote in his book Rationality, “we ought to follow reason.” So, within this hyper-emotional framework our societies have adopted, how can we turn the tide, readjust and foster rationality?

The multifariousness of this question far exceeds the limits of this article (and the knowledge of the writer). Nonetheless, incremental progress towards a more reasonable society could commence from a linguistic outset. Words after all, serve as proxies for action. Language does not completely determine our thoughts—our thoughts are far too flexible for that—but habitual uses of specific language can influence our habit of thought-process and action. It is evident that the words we use and the way we use them have a significant impact on our thoughts and actions. Various studies have shown that language patterns, such as the use of words that emphasize positive or negative aspects of life, can greatly affect our state of mind and demeanor.

Therefore, by avoiding hyperbole in our vocabulary with the use of emotionally charged words (such as the ones with the hyper prefix) and by choosing more moderate means of expression, we can gradually and progressively shift our mindset. Obviously, this turn requires a collective approach with the involvement of the educational system, the media and of course the leaders of our societies. With the contemporary decision-making fatigue we are facing, which is a plight of our age, we need to strike a fine balance between our two inherent modes of thinking, namely the rational reasoning and the emotional reasoning.

“Everything in moderation”, Aristotle said.