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Hello, friend. You’re reading The How to Live Newsletter—a weekly exploration of psychology and philosophy, offering thought-provoking insights to deepen your understanding of life’s complexities and help make the hard parts of living feel a little easier.

Feeling Before Thinking: What Susan Sontag Taught Us About Experience as the True Language of Understanding.

The project of my life has been overcoming all that holds me back, and all that holds me back is my mind.

So, the project of my life is overcoming my mind.

Why is the mind so often the place where we get trapped? Why are we consumed by thoughts concerned with who we are or aren't instead of simply living the who-ness of ourselves?

One reason, I assume, is to avoid feeling the discomfort of what our thoughts want us to believe. Instead of feeling the discomfort in our bodies and assessing it for what it is—emotions—we escape to a crueler place: our mind, where we interpret our every interaction to convince ourselves that what we fear is valid.

We spend so much time dissecting our social, romantic, and workplace interactions—analyzing personal dynamics, professional failures, and disappointments—yet so little time directly engaging with the sensory and emotional experience of life itself. The result? We wind up repeating much of what we'd hoped to avoid. After all, it is far easier to intellectualize emotion than to feel it—but where does this lead?

In the seminal essay from her 1966 book Against Interpretation, writer, intellectual and cultural critic, Susan Sontag protests against the habit of critiquing and analyzing art in favor of developing a more emotional connection with art and literature.

What she shares shifted how I think about thinking. Maybe it will do something for you as well.

Read on…we’re about to get into it…

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