We think that we can’t help but feel what we feel. If we feel angry or sad, it’s not that we can just flip a switch and change how we feel. Feelings are just there. You might be able to mask them, but you can’t change what you’re feeling.

But we underestimate how much our narratives affect our feelings. I won’t say that we can control feelings like a thermostat. Because we can’t just start believing a different narrative whenever we want.

But sometimes this happens to us: we feel very strong feelings because we think a certain narrative is the truth, but then we find out that we were wrong and some other narrative is the truth, and our feelings change instantly.

An example of this happened a few months back when I was walking along the highway in the morning. Our village is just below the highway and that’s the only road I have for running or walking in the morning. I always walk on the side where the vehicles are coming towards me, so that I can jump aside if a vehicle comes too close to the shoulder. This is usually a problem at turns where I’m on the inside of the turn, because vehicles naturally drift inwards so as to maintain maximum speed. So, I’m careful at such points and try to make sure that the vehicle has seen me and knows I’m there.

On this day, it happened not at such a turn but on a straight after such a turn. The driver of a truck drifted inwards at the turn while I was still quite far away on the straight, and then continued in that same line along the straight. He even began drifting right on to the shoulder. It was quite disconcerting to see a truck heading straight towards you at significant speed.

I got off the shoulder and on to the unpaved section and still the truck continued towards me. At the last moment, the truck veered back to the center of his lane and just about missed me.

It happened so fast that I didn’t have a chance to wave at the driver to get his attention or even see if he was distracted or sleepy or something.

As soon as that happened, I was filled with anger. I turned back and angrily stared at the truck and thought to myself, “what the fuck?“

The immediate narrative that I took for the absolute truth was that the driver had done it deliberately to scare me for some reason. Why would someone do that? I didn’t know but I was sure that that’s what had happened. And I was so angry! I started ranting in my head about everything that’s wrong with the world and how people have lost their humanity.

After a while, I realized that it’s not likely that someone would do that deliberately. The more likely scenario was that he was checking his phone and didn’t realize that he was drifting sideways. As soon as this new narrative became believable to me, my anger was completely gone.

It was replaced with the feeling that you get when you shake your head and go “tut-tut.” I wasn’t angry anymore, just disappointed. I was about to start a new rant in my head about how smartphones will be the doom of humanity, when I became aware of how quickly my feelings had changed.

Then I excitedly thought about my philosophy and about narrative orientation and how strongly our narratives affect our feelings.

What had really happened that day? I can never know the absolute truth about it. All I can do is believe a narrative about what happened. And which narrative I choose to believe, affects how I feel about it.

The catch is that it’s not always a matter of simple choice. We usually believe such narratives to be the truth and even if someone offers us another narrative, we can’t just switch because it’ll make us feel better.

But the awareness about narratives and this entire process, can help us choose better narratives, when that is an option. And when it isn’t an option, this meta-awareness can reduce the strength of our feelings caused by our narratives.

In this way, my philosophy is very similar to some spiritual traditions.