Oh, how it seems like one lives in a new world here on the internet. In the old world, feelings were private, shameful things the repression of which caused women to faint and men to die at 45 of natural causes. Now, in the age of sharing, feelings are sacrosanct, immutable judgements that cannot be denied, no matter the facts or the context. (And if there is some pet cause springing to your mind or if you are worried I’m about to use the word ‘snowflake’ in a boorish manner, don’t worry.)
This isn’t a phenomenon relegated to one particular aspect of these times, but rather a happening within the zeitgeist of the digital age. Some of its outcroppings are inherently good, others are inherently bad. Some are found on the left of the political spectrum. Some are found on the right. The problem is that society runs on a pendulum. It swings religious, it swings secular. It swings totalitarian, it swings democratic. It swings punk, it swings boy bands. The problem is the fact that it swings, rather than moves forward carefully towards the horizon. We’re a bunch of absolutist apes who can’t grasp a middle ground collectively as well as we can individually.
Here’s the rub: Feelings are good! The feels let you feels all the feels you feel like, feel me? But feelings are not plaster to fill in gaps of knowledge. They are not things that you should base policy on. They are not solid. Feelings are water, they ripple, they rain, they pour, the crash, they break, but most importantly they ebb, flow, and evaporate.
Go ahead, try to feel the same way all day. You can of course, but it’s an incredible amount of emotional heavy lifting. One has to keep refiring the emotional trigger in order to sustain what otherwise might be a five minute sensation. Or some outside factor causes that trigger to pulled, again and again until the feeling is a worn image of its original. Feelings are not solid ground to stand on when trying to shape the course of events.
Maybe for this new year, we can try to place value on both feeling and fact to achieve some sort of harmonious synthesis. If we feel like it.
