Don't Listen to Your Heart

It's hilarious to me that 'trust/listen/follow your heart' is still a thing.

People automatically assume it's sage advice, because....well, their hearts are telling them it's sage advice. They're taking the advice before they take the take the advice in order to take the advice. Whoa.

Let's put this advice through the Bullcrap Translator real quick, and see what comes out.

.....

.....

.....

...Ding!

"Do whatever the heck you want."

Yeah, listening to your heart is just doing whatever feels good. I ask you, how many people have *ever* lived fulfilling lives by just doing whatever they felt like at any given moment?

You may be thinking, "But your conscience! Your conscience is in the general area of the heart, right?! And you should listen to that!" Well yes, yes you should. Sometimes. Not all the time, actually. But sometimes, when we act like jerks, we feel bad about it. In those particular instances, we should act on those guilty feelings and try to fix whatever screwed up thing we just did.

But we only feel bad about doing bad things *because we know in our brains that those things are bad*. Imagine a universe where murder is perfectly acceptable. Killing people is as commonplace as killing houseflies (PETA would be very happy in this universe. Let's teleport them there). In this universe, would you feel bad about cutting down the guy who just cut in front of you in line? No, why should you? You didn't do anything wrong, as far as you know. You swatted a fly.

That's because guilt comes from the voice in our *heads* telling us that we just did a terrible thing. We *feel* guilt in our hearts because we *know* in our minds that we ought to feel guilty, even if we try to push that to the back of our minds.

The greatest mistakes of my life were made because I listened to my heart and did what I wanted. I'm not saying I have any brilliant new revolutionary info here. Others have said this kind of thing before. It just really, really bugs me that they're all continuously drowned out by things like, "follow your heart and you'll never get lost" and "the heart never lies" and other such innumerable falsehoods.

Your heart knows how to pump blood. That's it. Your brain is *specifically designed for the sole purpose of knowing stuff* and yet we still don't listen to it. We listen to the blood pumper, because hey, he looks like he really knows what he's talking about right?