Imagination and Emotional Acceptance, A Media Experiment

Listen carefully to the words of this song. What do you hear? Does it make you think about a moment in your own life, a memory maybe? Or does it possibly cause you to start imagining a different scenario you wished had happened from that one moment? There’s something about a specific song, a single emotion, that can spark so much within us.

How often do you catch yourself listening to a song on the radio, driving down the highway, and you start thinking about a specific person or place? Then all of a sudden some emotion, or a rush of multiple emotions, smacks you in the face. Instantly you either change the station or you give in and succumb to all the gross icky feelings. But yet, you can’t help but in the back of your mind still wonder, imagine, maybe even have a little play by play scene going through your head of a different scenario that could have played out, where you wouldn’t have had to feel that unnerving feeling you just felt.

In society we are faced with many stigmas of what is or is not acceptable when it comes to emotions and how we display them. Because of this, a lot of our life decisions are based on what we think others expect or want from us, where in reality, we may have imagined a different outcome. We turn to outlets such as social media, music, friends, etc., to distract us from the deepest parts of us that we’d rather ignore and not deal with. At what point does someone ask, “Is technology playing a part in numbing us down?” Are all these screens and other outlet forms satisfying our needs to deal with things on our own? We turn to a song, listen to it, relate to its lyrics, feel something for a moment, imagine a different time and place, and move on.