How do you feel now?
How do you “feel” now (your mental/physical state — for convenience, let us call it positive/negative) is impacted by many things: Things you ate, Exercise, Sleep, Bowel movement, Sexual Activity, Who you spent time with, What did you read, What did you do/work on and so on. And all those things from last minute, last hour, earlier today, yesterday, last week, recent past, last year, last 5 years, last 10 years all the way to lifetime.
Usually the impact of the act is high in the immediate future and diminishes over time (like what you ate yesterday affects you today but it would not matter next week) but I suspect in some cases it could be the reverse (I am not able to come up with a good example for this).
Nonetheless, there is an element of compounding effect in all of them. That is, if you do something everyday, the impact the next day (of any particular day) is less but the impact in the long term is more. An obvious example being ‘Physical Exercise’ — If you exercise every day, while the incremental benefit of a day’s exercise is low, the cumulative impact over the long term is high. You can easily pick a negative example too. There is a saying from my mental model notes that comes to mind — What you do each day reflects what you will accomplish in life!
Similarly, what you do now (which will be a function of how you feel now — ha) will impact the next minute, hour, tomorrow, next week, year and so on. Again, depending on the aspect of life, impact will be high/low tomorrow/next year and there will be compounding effects.
You can think of this as a huge concentric circle as below:
What is the point of this? Well, there is no point, it is all circles. Haha.
Since you asked, let us come up with something. I think it could be: Remember that what you do now (irrespective of how you feel, which is a function of what you did earlier) is going to affect the rest of your life. So, every moment, choose to invest your time wisely and act wisely so that your ‘feelings’ are better (more positive) in the future. For example, you could avoid pseudo-philosophical blogs. 😃
How to break the influence of how you feel (which is a function of what you did previously) in what you do currently is left as an exercise to the reader.
And the question of “if you can break the influence, why bother now, can do it later” is left as an exercise for the advanced readers.
PS: Now, you can also ask what is the point of feeling positive ever! Fair. I honestly do not have an answer to it yet. Amor Fati is all I can say.
Update: Apart from the “feel” part, how you “behave” at any time (which no doubt is influenced by how you “feel”) is a function of what happened last second, minute, hour and so on till life started on earth, argues this book:
https://www.amazon.in/Behave-Biology-Humans-Best-Worst/dp/1594205078/
