rats, according to nobel prize winner daniel kahnemann, will pleasure themselves to death by starvation when hooked up the a machine in which they control the pleasure centers in their own brains. humans, it seems by analogy, are no different. this is why i have chosen the attitude in life that i have chosen. call it pragmatism if you’d like. it’s similar to psychopathy and sociopathy in a sense but instead of being inherent it’s tightly controlled. i am fundamentally an emotional person. i have spent the entirety of my adult life becoming an emotionally controlled person and i have become quite good at it. there are moments when i swipe at people like a cat or well up with sadness, but they are far and few between. i have observed that people tend to perceive me as a either this or that depending on which persona i present to them and often they are shocked when they discover that the two personas are radically different. at work i tend to be perceived as a robot — unfriendly yet productive. in my social life, which is slowly becoming as controlled as my emotions (on unrelated but comparable intensity scales), i appear a bit wild and rowdy. how to compare these two personas? i am one of the few people on earth who can distinguish them in myself. rarely do the multiplicities of personas meet in public spaces. the truth is that I have not allowed myself to be the rat. through self-discipline and sheer force of will, i attenuate my continual pleasure – the same continual pleasure that most people are afforded this day in age and the same continual pleasure they engage in until they kill themselves inadvertently. i choose when to be happy and when to be sad. i often blame it on autism spectrum disorder and it may well be that. yet somehow i am a successful person with high ethical standards and likewise i am neither a psychopath nor a sociopath.