On Feelings and Emotion

In today's modern society there seems to be an unfortunate amount of disproportionate disdain for feelings and emotions. Unless, of course, those emotions can be commodified. As with anything in an imperfect-capitalistic society, deviations from the norm will be punished unless they are exploitable. Since many emotions have the drawback of allowing people to make irrational decisions, be those financial or social, indulging in these emotive desires is shunned and dismissed as a mixture of weakness and stupidity. Hence, the larger part of society has ignored or turned away from emotions, both in individual situations and on a general level.

However, in dismissing emotion, we can also dismiss a very large part of our collective psyche. The Patriot Act wasn't necessarily passed due to pure and unadulterated reason. It was passed because people were afraid, and that's not necessarily a bad thing. The debate surrounding the politics of the Patriot Act aside, the thing to take away from this is the fact that the utilization of fear and other feelings in decision making is prevalent and to ignore such a large sociological motivator would be to cut off both of our intellectual feet. In addition, a case can be made for emotion on the grounds of mental health. The debate surrounding mental health as an issue in today's society focuses largely on how to pay for the care of these people, yet we never seem to recognize that the sociological environment that we have fostered could be an essential factor in cultivating these skyrocketing rates of depression, anxiety, and other illnesses.

The interesting thing is, there is a case to be made for more emphasis on rational thought. Science, for example, is based on reaching the highest level of objectivity that you can whilst observing the world, and one simply can't do that while viewing data through an emotional lens. Science can in turn be said to be largely responsible for the massive amounts of progress we, as a species, have seen in the past several centuries. As such, an expansion of science, and a subsequent reduction of emotion, sounds extremely desirable. But as mentioned before, this still has significant drawbacks in a world that still operates on reality rather than theory.

What we need is a new way of looking at emotion. Today, many people think of emotion as a scalar quantity. That is, it is though of on a scale. Even professional institutions, like hospitals, read emotion and pain on a scale of one to ten. This is completely ludicrous if one accounts for the fact that the very nature of emotion is subjective and how, therefore, any attempt at obtaining quantitative data from a qualitative rating would untrustworthy. And this is where the root problem lies: trying to transition qualitative experience to a quantitative report. A solution should therefore attempt to preserve the qualitative nature of emotion, even as we try to communicate with other people.

I propose an idea: instead of looking at emotion as a scalar quantity, we instead need to recognize that it is instead a vector. That is, it contains both magnitude and direction. This is due to the fact that a large part of how we view the world has to do with the fact that our consciousness exists in liner time. If you are happy, it's not like you're happy at a single point in time. It would be more accurate to say that you feel like things are going well. The general trend you see in your life is a positive one. Of course, shifting your frame of reference to include, say, a week from now when you have a large project due that you haven't finished, you will be then less happy because that assignment then lowers the average of the trend line of you life a little. The same can be said for emotional disorders like depression. It's not a feeling sad all the time, as many people point out. A better way to look at it would be to see it as feeling like things are continuously getting worse. The emotional trend line of your life always seems to be pointing down in some context or another. Understanding that emotions have direction, they have acceleration, is crucial to coming up with a better way to express emotion and incorporate it into the entirety of our lives.