Read How I Met Your Mother and Philosophy for Free Online

illusion. Since we partly create every emotion that we have by making a narrative, we create every emotion.
    However, this argument does not hold since we could still make a distinction between the emotions we unconsciously create and those we have consciously manipulated. The creation of a narrative is not fully dependent on our free will. Narratives are influenced by a number of factors, such as interaction with significant others, childhood experiences, and other values inherent in our culture and the narratives we have encountered during our lives. So a large part of the origin of our narratives, and therefore of our emotions, finds inspiration in the environment we live in. The narratives we create are mostly based on other stories we’ve heard.
    But true creative people like Barney create their own narratives. They’re like artistic geniuses who don’t imitate other paintings, models, and stories. They shape their own stories.That’s why Barney changes from being a loser into being awesome. He used to be a soft-hearted hippie and wanted to join the Peace Corps with his long-time girlfriend, Shannon. When she dumps him for a womanizer, Barney becomes another person. He chooses to be awesome instead of sad. Was this action one of self-manipulation? Yes. Do his feelings have the negative connotation of being illusions? Probably. But isn’t it more important to be awesome than to be sincere? Why not manipulate your own emotions?
    A good, but also slightly controversial, example is love. Can we decide to fall in love? The emotion of love is based on a narrative, which is heavily influenced by the narratives we have encountered during our lives. Some examples of these paradigmatic narratives are our parents’ relationship, our own experiences; cultural values, and most importantly, Disney movies. Our high and unreachable ideals of love are mostly based on Disney movies. Disney is the direct cause of many unhappy people who have realized that their spouse is not quite like the prince or princess they had imagined.
    So much about general narratives of love. But what about specific episodes of love? Can you just choose to fall in love with somebody? One thing for sure is that falling in love is something you do. Yet this is not the same as saying that it is a matter of choice. You fall in love based on who you are and based on the narratives you consist of. They don’t only originate from your narratives of love, but also from the narratives of your personality and your life goals.
    Falling in love with someone is putting a person into your own love narrative. So love is something we do. I have made the distinction between an ‘unconsciously done action’ type of emotion and a ‘conscious action’ emotion. I have argued that the conscious sort is a manipulation. But this isn’t a bad thing—on the contrary, it’s far more creative and courageous to manipulate your emotions.
    If we apply this reasoning to love, though, this claim seems rather weird. If you consciously manipulate yourself to fall in love with someone, you will never manage to convince yourself that you actually love this person. You ‘fall’ in love, you don’t choose your love. So no matter how hard you try, manipulating yourself won’t get you to love someone. The best you can do is to create an illusion instead of feeling a genuine emotion.
    When I said that controlling your emotions is a courageous and creative thing to do, I didn’t mean that you can choose to feel whatever you want. We cannot control our judgments or appraisals, as I have said. Falling in love is not a matter of choice. Yet, we can place our appraisals in a different kind of narrative. For instance, at the end of Ted’s first date with Robin, he tells her that he loves her. He shows that he places his positive feelings in a totally different narrative than Robin does. She shares the same positive feelings