Being Logical & Practical – A necessary evil?

I was an extremely emotional kid and teenager – tears welled up in my eyes if I saw people begging in the streets or sleeping on the pavements. It was just painful to see poor people suffering everywhere around me and the only achievement which differentiated me from them was being born in a relatively well to do family. There wasn’t remotely anything fair about this (though I later accepted perhaps it wasn’t supposed to be fair). As years passed and scientific principles of practicality and logic were super-imposed on my feeling mind, I started taking pride in becoming more practical and less emotional by rationalizing it was the only way to avoid snapping.

I started my corporate career as a marketing analyst and it was my job to break down sales into the 5Ps of marketing mix. Basically, I learnt to measure effectiveness and ROI (return on investment) based on what-if scenarios and it was a wonderful skill to apply to my personal life too. Consequentially, practicality kicked in as I was able to analyze the outcomes of my choices in an unbiased way and my experience of life started improving with positive results.

But little did I realize that I was slowly reducing every occurrence in life to a transaction where I was just answering a single question – what do I get out of this? As I lost more hair doing these calculations, I had earned enough (or perhaps my dad had) to allow myself some leeway to travel and explore the world, a childhood dream. The more I travelled, the more I experienced a strange cocktail of emotions – joyfulness and confusion. I mostly travelled to offbeat places and the satisfaction I achieved sitting in the lap of nature doing absolutely nothing didn’t fit any of my equations of effectiveness. Logically speaking, I was only wasting my time and not getting anything out of the whole experience but experientially speaking, the feeling was just unworldly and better by a factor of at-least 10 than when I had achieved the best case scenarios during my logical analysis.

The more time I spent in nature and solitude, the more I was convinced that if I think completely logically, there was actually no point to life. And yet, I was in ecstasy listening to the songs of the birds and the beauty of a sunrise. Logical and experiential dimensions were diametrically opposite extremes of a single conundrum. My idea (or rather figment of imagination which is still hazy at best) of a fulfilling life couldn’t be reached by pure logic – it could definitely lead me to a Lamborghini which I had always wanted as a teenager but I remembered how quickly I had lost that crazy lust for my first sports-bike post owning it. To be fair, I still love riding but it’s just not the kind of fulfilment I am alluding to.

The experience of life is always way richer during unexplained moments of not thinking at all, let alone thinking logically. And trust me, this was utterly confusing as it questioned all the core underlying assumptions of my life and left me pretty disillusioned. Mountains kept calling and I kept obliging – to a point that I was in the mountains every 15 days no matter what it took. And the more confused I became – questioning all my beliefs about life.

I can’t pinpoint when this immense confusion dissolved into a sense of clarity I had never experienced or expected. I started exploring dimensions unknown to me – experimented with different religious beliefs, read a ton of philosophical and spiritual literature while trying my best to not put everything into a scientific equation and see if LHS = RHS (which I was trained to do since birth).

Intuitively, I somehow know (or believe) logic can’t be the answer to existential queries and reaching a point where I can turn on/off the calculative being in me as per the demands of time & space seems like a worthwhile goal for now. What do you think?  Do you love/enjoy being logical?