Patur Aval Assur,
What is the value of aligning motivation with ??? if not the good feeling?
This is the fundamental question of humanity, the one that Chava grappled with right after her encounter with the snake.
Assuming we care about our lives, a basic reason to seek deeper purpose is longer term benefit. We have bigger brains, so we can predict further into the future than animals can. Getting a vaccine hurts, which is not a good short term feeling, and small children have to be held down to get a shot, but we adults understand it may protect us from diseases down the road, and most of us would willingly go to the doctor for the shot. For Chava, her conundrum was that eating from the tree would sure taste good and give her a lot of knowledge, but then she’d die (or maybe not, said her rationalizations).
As human beings, while we find avoiding death to be more desirable than ephemeral pleasure, I don’t think we’d be satisfied with just that. We’re not here to just eat and avoid getting eaten for as long as we can. So we seek greater purpose. I am Jewish so I believe that we have a Creator Who has an intended purpose for us and directs us to it via the Torah. What we learn about our purpose, however, may conflict with our existing notions of what makes us feel good, and we then arrive at that same primeval question Chava faced once again.
So it seems that the good feeling is based on the person’s own understanding of his purpose. The terrorist thinks his purpose is to kill people and he feels good; the good samaritan thinks his purpose is to help people and he feels good. At the end of the day what is the difference between them?
Now we’re hitting a fundamental question of humanity post tree. Once upon a time we could clearly see our purpose. Now our desire to feel good beats so loudly within us that we can follow it instead of our true purpose, making up false purposes along the way and convincing ourselves that they’re right in order to shush our existential discontent. Instead of the driver leading the horse, the horse goes where it wants and the driver convinces himself that that is where he’s supposed to be.