Why We Feel Stuff
You feel stuff. You do. Think about it. You feel sadness, you feel joy, you feel anger, you feel guilt, shame, jealousy, pride, loneliness, anxiety, etc. etc. etc. People feel a plethora of emotions, some more than others, and some less. The range of emotions that people feel is far and wide and often caused by stimulations from the outside world; our thoughts are the response to those stimulations. We think at a rate so fast that our emotions can change quickly, cycling through emotion after emotion while still staying relatively involved in feeling all of the different ones.
You feel things deep sometimes; you have emotions you don’t have the vocabulary to explain and maybe that’s because they aren’t concrete. What do we do when diction cannot be used to describe how we are feeling? We invent a whole bunch of words to describe all these far out feelings and end up confused by them. There are all these feelings that we don’t understand, caused by things unnatural, and we just put them off; we pull ourselves out of feeling them. It’s like déjà vu- the feeling of having already lived what you’re living. It’s the idea of having already lived through the present situation. It is a French term that somehow is expanded across cultures, literally meaning “already seen”. However, there is a lesser known phrase of “jamais vu,” which means “never seen,” and describes experiencing a situation that seems familiar, but inevitably unknown.
But here’s the ever-present question (that isn’t actually ever present) that I’m sure almost no one gives a crap about: why do we feel things? What causes it? Why do we have so many emotions that run all the time? Why do we have the empathy or lack thereof, that ranges differently across the human species? Why do we feel so many things, and at different scales? Why does the universe hate us?
Now here’s the kicker: I’d say we don’t really know. And maybe I’m wrong, maybe there is some person out there, an omniscient being who knows every answer to every question and has the diction to explain every emotion and feeling that every single person feels (maybe it’s Mr. Schwartz?). But I doubt it. Brains are weird; that’s undeniable. Brains are strange, unexplainable currently because we don’t have enough information about them to formulate an explanation to why we do all this stupid stuff. And maybe it’s not stupid, but humans will be humans. Some people feel shame for the emotions they experience which would make sense. Jealousy, for instance, is an emotion that makes you feel guilty. But it’s a human emotion, and everyone feels it at some point or another, in one way or another.
“When we interact with other people, it is important to give clues to help them understand how we are feeling. These clues might involve emotional expression through body language, such as various facial expressions connected with the particular emotions we are experiencing.”
The brain isn’t dedicated to one single emotion, studies have shown. No one section of the brain is completely dedicated to a single emotion; they have multiple focuses. There is no such thing as “sadness neurons,” and no part of our brain is made with the purpose of being triggered by outward stimuli and causing us to feel more emotions. We are better with identifying emotions by sight, seeing facial expressions and bodies reacting in a certain way, allowing us to identify their emotion based on what we know.
The ease with which we experience emotions, and the effortlessness with which we see emotions in others, doesn’t mean that each emotion has a distinct pattern in the face, body or brain.
So, we experience these emotions effortlessly, we have to try specifically to not feel things, we have to put in the effort to not feel things and have ourselves be as immune as individually possible to emotions as either a whole group or one in particular. We have to try to put ourselves outside the circle of feeling, contrasting with the effortless ability of which our brains allow us, encourage us usually, to feel things.
Each emotion cannot be specific. Sure, we have words for each individual one feeling, anger, fear, happiness, sadness, jealousy, but aren’t some of these combinations? Do we ever feel one singular emotion? Usually, our brains intermingle emotions, adding a mix of feelings that apply to our reaction to a situation. Jealousy can be a mixture of sadness, anger, and sometimes shame. There are emotions that are unable to be described by words, emotions that can only be given light to, described, in certain languages. Deja vu is an example, it’s a French phrase that is used amongst different languages because, for some reason, the translation doesn’t cross over quite as meaningfully as the original. There are words like sonder, ellipsism, chrysalism, adronitis, and so many others. These words have meanings for oddly specific feelings that someone, who knows who created a word for. Chrysalism is the feeling of being warm and peaceful within a dry house during a thunderstorm. So specific, right?
We feel all these things and sometimes we cannot explain why. Mental illnesses are a good example of the question of why people feel things, depression isn’t always explainable by such simple terms. People can be so tired, but it’s not caused by their life, their life can be so, so slow but they can still be always tired. People feel so many things, all these different emotions that can intermix, intertwine and can work together or not. We feel things for a purpose, almost always, there is a reason why, even if we do not know the reason. Why would anyone feel something for no reason, can we even make ourselves feel things? Over time, maybe, but the risk of making yourself feel things, giving up the honesty of your emotions would be painful.
