Wasted Emotions

I heard the term "WastedEmotions" mentioned by a radio commentary, days after the September 11, 2001 attack in New York. Most of the FirstWorld? were still in shock.

The commentator observed that in the light of the events of that fateful day, he came to recognize that there were lots of WastedEmotions in our conduct of our daily life. We get unnecessarily entangled in feuds with other no less intelligent, and similarly frail individuals. Only an earthshattering event would make some of us stop and reflect on our actions.

Perhaps this GO-GO-GO society has hypnotized us into taking actions before our brain has the chance to think. On WardsWiki, periodic EditWar flare-ups mirror real-life feuds we have with people around us.

Do we always have to respond right away? What positive things have we achieved through rapid-fire actions?

Interesting concept. Emotion as "wasted" effort. Makes it sound like emotions are work.

Emotions are essentially where we resonate at any given moment with regard to any given topic. "Appropriate" emotions are those that fit a consensus, but this requires a group setting.

It is clearly observable that emotions are a subjective phenomenon. I've sat in movies where scene content was met with tears from one and chuckles from another. I've told jokes that elicited, at once, laughter, derision, and disgust. I've been at the scene of a fatal accident where there was weeping, anger, fear, and boredom all simultaneously displayed.

What is often missed is that "emotion" is not just mis-emotion. People often refer to others' responses as "emotional" or "showed no emotion" where emotional = angry/sad/forlorn and no-emotion = bored/interested/cheerful. Anger, grief, apathy, boredom, fear, hate, cheerfulness, interest, enthusiasm, and so on are ALL emotions, just not all negative emotions.

Given that emotions are so clearly individual and so dependent on the experience, training, belief, and understanding of an individual, it should also be plain that emotions are not only resonating with the external event (stimulus, if you prefer), but also with past (stored) events (remembered or not), so that I may find clowns funny, you may remember that a clown yelled at his dog and thus find them uninteresting (feet of clay and all that), while she over there may break down in tears at clowns without knowing why.

Key to this is the phrase with regard to any given topic. When nothing of any particular importance or urgency looms, we may find ourselves drifting in a kind of "emotional soup" made up of our boredom with breakfast, our annoyance at the idiot in the fast lane during our commute, our delight at the joke we heard on the radio, our dread of the stupid meeting we're having at 11:00am with the project manager, and our enthusiastic anticipation of the date we have lined up for tonight. What we'll feel at any given moment will have something to do with which topic we've tuned in just then. Yes, there is a tendency for an individual to resonate more in one band than another, but the modifiers will be topical.

When an event of overwhelming magnitude intrudes, the importance of the little things gets reassigned, the bias changes, and the grudge against the idiot in the fast lane may simply be dismissed. The importance of tonight's date may suddenly wax greater, the enthusiasm muted somewhat by other importances.

Our performance at any moment in this flow will be enhanced or impaired by the emotion of the moment. The emotion itself is just where we resonate, while the effort we expend may increase to overcome the bias induced by the emotional dissonance, or, indeed, the effort may lighten considerably, depending on how cheerful or enthusiastic we now find ourselves.

There is always effort. How much effort can be a function of our mood. It isn't the emotion that's wasted – that's like saying that "purple is wasted" – it's the effort or counter-effort engendered by the mood. That may seem like a rather fine, even contrived, distinction but anyone familiar with signal gain and attenuation in tuned environments (antennas, oscillators, heterodyning circuits) will grasp this at once.

Now, if you can assign the correct importances to events and circumstances, the attenuation from emotional dissonance will be much less. Or you can wait until an overwhelming event comes along to help out with that adjustment to your perception.

-- GarryHamilton

CategoryBigPicture