The Writer or the Elephant?

Life is a constant struggle of choices; some easy while others exemplify a confounding variety. Suppose you’re presented with the choice of cake. You open up the fridge, and you gander over yonder towards a delicious cheese cake sitting right there on the second shelf. Observe the Oreo crust and how it elegantly decorates the chocolate cheesecake flavor with its crumby goodness. One side of you, the elephant side, says, “I’m going to devour this entire fucking platter,” while the other side of you, the writer side, says, “I’ll only take one slice from this cake.” Which one takes hold of you? Which one wins in this incredibly confounding dilemma?

We must first take a look at both sides of this argument. The writer represents the voice of reason in your tiny noggin, while the elephant represents your animalistic urges and feelings. These two forces govern all of our actions on a day-to-day basis in our lives. It is often difficult to discern between the two. More often than not, the elephant is confused for the writer. When you eat the entire cheesecake in the fridge, the elephant has taken hold while the writer tries to excuse the action after the fact. Because the writer has excused the action, we think that it was the writer’s choice to eat the cake. In reality, it was the elephant that wanted the cake, because it’s a big monster that loves sweets.

For difficult conundrums where you’re unsure as to which force controls which, a good rule of thumb is that if the action in question is illogical or backed with little to no reason, then the action is being governed by nothing but feeling, nothing but the elephant. The question is really this: Will you let reason control feeling or let feeling control reason?

But why does all of this matter? Why should you be concerned with any of this? What matters is if you are happy with your choices.