This, too, I noted a while back, but will likely treat a little differently. I write so much I can’t remember what exactly I wrote where.
It seems to me that the constant search for various sorts of emotion–one might almost refer to such people as experience collectors–is an orienting gestalt, or what I have termed a meaning system. It is a way of answering the question: what should I do today and why? Your answer: seek out new experiences and emotions, since that is the point of life.
The problem with this way of living is that often the best emotions come unbidden, when we are trying to do something else entirely. It takes a lot of skill to properly consume experience–to feel the feelings you think you are supposed to be feeling, and which in my estimation most people don’t–and so you get yourself to some experience that should be exhilirating, and it doesn’t measure up. Very little in life can measure up to, as Paul Simon put it in Kodachrome, “our sweet imagination”.
Moreover, this is not really a principle that can guide your life, particularly in conditions of conflict. If feeling is what you want, then is the feeling of comfort and safety not preferable to strenuous exertion and danger, at least if choosing the latter implies a moral decision, as in participating in war? At what point do you fight, and why? Because it feels good? There was a soldier portrayed in the Russian movie Company 9 who talked about the value of war. He was killed. Was his death meaningful? The war was lost.
In my view, you have to have principles with some actual content–which as I say often necessarily includes the integrity to regularly compare stated aims with actual results–or you will wind up lost and unhappy.