Word processing emotion

 

After being told in various contexts that I am not comforting to talk to, I looked up how to comfort someone. The AI response suggested nothing that I was unaware of, implying that there is something in the tone or style that I lack rather than intention. But what did catch my eye was the established phrase ‘time to process emotion’.

 

 

                This raises some questions. Do we really mean ‘process’? This implies a raw input and a final, different product. Does suffering naturally get turned into happiness, or resilience, over time? Not for me. Would it be more accurate to say ‘experience emotions’?

                I think that there is an implicit understanding that we adapt to circumstances. We experience mind-numbing pain and grief only in relatively brief bouts. The problem might not be solved, but our bodies are only capable of so much experience of one type before giving up for a while. The physical version of this is a little stone in a shoe: at first it’s annoying, but after a few miles of hiking you’ll have forgotten about it and only occasionally remember that it’s there. If you sit down for a while, you'll feel it all over again when you start. Grief similarly comes and goes in cycles of pain.

                Does this mean that the feeling is ‘processed’? Has the initial input been turned into something else? I don’t think so. It’s very much becoming inured to the feeling. It’s still waiting, ready to be experienced at any time, but not right now. The video is still playing but attention has turned elsewhere, because there are other things in the world. The video has not changed or been turned off.

               

                Calling it ‘processing’ probably perpetuates misunderstandings of how grief and suffering work. Grief is not a thing like a cut that one is supported through and then healed from a day or two later. It’s a change in life circumstance such as losing one’s home and belongings. It’s not something to ‘process’ in a moment or a few days. It is processed in the same sense that all of life is a process.

 

                I do not know if other people genuinely need time to understand how they feel; to introspect and understand themselves. It seems strange not to know oneself, but perhaps what is meant is not so much knowing that one’s home has gone, but working out what one can face doing in the new life: how one might host guests, where to get the right attire for formal events… recalculating how to deal with the myriad challenges of life from a different place.

                I think that many people do like to think of emotions as things to process. It’s part of the positivity cult that forbids anyone from experiencing the full range of life. Life is good and unhappiness must be processed like a carcass, turned into processed joy. Find the positives to death or suffering. ‘Well, at least it was a good life’… it was a good life before death. Death added nothing good.

                Bad things do exist. They are natural, standard features of our world and lives. If we regard them as raw inputs that through industry can be made safe we’ll never address them properly. Death and disease are nightmares: horrors that cannot be made good. Just like right-wing ideology. We might never defeat them, but we must recognize that the only good, virtuous course of action is to eradicate them to the best of our ability, not accept them as key components of a full existence.

 

                If people do not know how they feel then there is a problem beyond the immediate suffering. Perhaps we need to give lessons in introspection. I am aware that this is a concept used elsewhere, such as to explain domestic violence and toxic masculinity, in which the only socially acceptable emotion for men to feel is anger, and so when they feel something they express anger even when it’s something else.

                Anger is appropriate in many circumstances. I have raged against the dying of the light a lot in my life. But I do not know if people really ‘feel’ a different emotion from the one they, er, feel. Can cultural conditioning stop you feeling the way you feel? Could we have toxic positivity that made everyone think that death is cause for celebration? We have tried this, called it religion (with delusions of an afterlife) and people still grieve. Toxic positivity turns out to make people feel worse, because they feel guilty or responsible for their sadness when they feel sad.

                So no, I don’t believe that people process emotions. Nor should you. What we do is cope. We become numb to the immediate feeling. If it was a good one, we crave more extreme versions. More love. More affection. More text messages and validation in an addictive cycle of impatience, never waiting for the numbness to fade and the original version to be fulfilling again.

If a bad one, we call it resilience and endure the constant dread of the moment that the numbness fades and the full horror returns to steal more of our lives and joy.

I believe that I have, through necessity, become very resilient. I have self control: I can continue to function rationally and sensibly (as much as normal) when experiencing emotions. The emotions’ effect on me are dampened compared to some, who feel obliged to whoop for joy or collapse in sadness, their brains and identity lost temporarily.

Self control is an archaic virtue not much respected any more. The economy wants us to spend; to give in to the advertisers and shop layout artists. Media wants us to get distracted, or to perform like hooting monkeys to distract others. Even live performers expect audience feedback to validate them, on top of the audience money that’s already been paid. The toxic positivity movement wants us to be happy and whimsical, and thinks that if we believe hard enough somehow we can wish away sadness and process it into joy.

This is all nauseating. We should aim to think, not feel. To be human, not animal. To experience time flowing by as a river, to be watched from the stable shore of rational thought rather than drowning in the river bed. If someone gets flooded, the goal should be to help them find solid ground somewhere, not to let them ‘process’ the experience by developing gills or imagining that the water is actually wine.

                Self-control; the existence of life outside of emotion, is part of what we teach in therapy classes for depression and bereavement. Some drugs for depression seem not only to treat the symptoms, but also to deaden libido. People complain about feeling dampened. I guess that when everything in your life seems bad, dampening might be a rescue, but many then feel that they have nothing to live for.

                Is it possible to have self-control but relax it for nice things? I have rarely felt safe enough to let go in any context. People have a disturbing tendency to abuse such moments as weakness, sometimes long afterwards when they think it somehow becomes alright to be nasty. Can one endure horror and yet experience the nicest things in life as fully as a whimsical candle in the wind? I don’t know.

I do know that ‘processing’ is a delusion. We don’t ‘process’ them and return to normal life. We help others by promising, implicitly, that we will always be there for them. That support and concern now won’t turn into mockery in a year; that we will never say ‘remember when you cried like a baby!?’. That we understand that the emotion is not processed: it exists in one’s life and memory exactly as it is, and always will.

'Revealed preferences' reveal economists' preference for cruelty

 

Economists like to cite the results of natural experiments or observations, in which people’s preferences are revealed by behaviour, rather than discovered by asking them. This is often said to be a truer reflection of someone’s preferences, as they must put their money (often literally) where their mouth is.

For example, you might ask someone in a questionnaire whether he would gamble £5 on a 10% chance of winning £60 and he might say that he would, but if you give him £5 and then ask him whether he wants to take a chance, he might not.

                People often talk the talk but when faced with a real choice do something else. Sometimes it’s about projecting an image; not only to other people, but sometimes to themselves, so that even an anonymous survey can be affected by the effect.

                I encounter this a lot when discussing whether things are good for us: people do it, so they must want to do it. Why should we regulate gambling, since people clearly benefit from it… i.e. they do it, and that must mean that the pleasure they get from satisfying the desire to do it is greater than the losses they incur?

                People behave a certain way, and therefore that way must be best for them; who are we to judge other people’s preferences?     

                I might first answer that for a rational person to behave optimally he needs perfect information, which is often not the case. And a certain type of political person might suggest that we spread information rather than regulating or taxing things that we think harm the doer. Sometimes teaching people is harder than outright forbidding them from doing something. This is why parents need various rules; children can do a lot of things that are unwise, and it takes time and effort to make them understand why they should not do them. If many such dangerous behaviours are available, a parent needs to forbid them all while (one hopes) gradually teaching the child.

                But beyond all this we might ask what advertising is for. If people are rational actors who only need information, why are adverts not bland descriptions and portrayals of the product on offer, merely ensuring that potential customers know that it exists? Why are we so familiar with, for example, pretty women in adverts? Why do we have an advertising industry at all?

                If I have a need and I discover that there is a product that satisfies it, and I am entirely rational, that should be sufficient for me to buy the product (or look into it and see that it is overpriced). Advertising exists to persuade us: to make us want a product.

                The ‘revealed inference’, through the existence of a whole industry (even if we were to ignore psychology as an academic pursuit), is that preference is malleable. We are irrational creatures, weak-willed and foolish. An established way to treat alcoholism is with a drug that is taken once (per day) and makes the user feel very ill if he then drinks alcohol. It relies on a person’s preferences changing through the day: he must be strong enough just once a day to take the tablet, and then he ‘locks in’ that strength, which otherwise might fail. If humans were consistent such a treatment would be unnecessary or impossible.             

                People also bemoan their procrastination. We have a whole word for putting off what one ‘wants’ to do. Should we assume that a person’s true preferences are to avoid doing what he claims to want to do? In a world of distraction machines, full of creations designed to take attention, fighting one’s way through to one’s own goals takes effort; effort that we do not always have, especially after long days of work which sap our focus.

                I think it’s naïve to treat all this behaviour as people’s true preference. People often clearly articulate what they want even when there is no social benefit from concealing truer preferences. What we have in conflict are different aspects of humanity.             

                In modern terminology, we might call it ‘system 1’ and ‘system 2’, following Daniel Kahneman’s categorisation of instinctive and thoughtful behaviours respectively. But he didn’t invent the idea. We have known about the contrast between hedonism and contentment (, for example,) for centuries. Even ignoring addiction, attention-theft and persuasion, there is a conflict between the experience of fun now and pleasure later. This conflict is one tool advertisers can use to persuade and addict people.

                If a person says that he wants contentment, and pleasure later, why should we take that as the lesser preference? We have a conflict between what he rationally says, and his behaviour, which can more easily be swayed by irrational concerns: impulsive weakness perhaps. We should probably trust his statement more than his behaviour. After all, what is the seat of humanity; of a soul? Is it the instinctive lizard-brain, or the sentient, thoughtful brain?

                Where behaviour does not match stated preference, that should tell us that there is social or market failure. False impressions, uncertainty over the future, or need for some happiness right now are all things we could avoid in a society that cared for its people. This would make far more sense than assuming that people truly wanted to self-destruct.

                For example, I would like a career in writing. You might find this short essay bad, or good. It doesn’t matter: I don’t pursue a career that I believe that I would find very fulfilling because it is uncertain. I could put a lot of effort in and not get anywhere, or get only poorly-paid tasks writing mostly under someone else’s creative control. I could learn and train if I’m not good enough, but I have no information about how good my work is nor how good it needs to be. The world is full of people who would like some artistic outlet but instead work in admin. jobs.

                Their revealed preferences are that they do not really want to be artistic. This contrast with their stated preferences shows that society is not set up for them. And what is society for except satisfying its people? We should listen to people’s ambitions and dreams. These are not ‘unreal’ preferences. They are dashed hopes, replaced with the fodder fed to us by advertisers.

                People might seem to be satisfied when they buy a new car whose adverts have repeated the idea that this provides freedom; that sitting in the driver’s seat makes one sexually desirable and powerful. What has really happened is that people who would have been fine were rendered unsatisfied by advertising, and some of them lose their money in order to make good that dissatisfaction. The same happens in grossly unequal places even without advertising: if you see other people who are fantastically well-off, you desire their lives even if you cannot have them. It doesn’t matter if outrageous wealth is achieved through obvious luck or luck masquerading as ability; the masses will still want such lives, and be less satisfied as a result. Inequality itself causes stress and suffering. I do believe that we should allow some difference in wealth and income, to reflect work done in life. But no human being is worth £millions a year when others receive mere £s.

                We should be helping people to achieve full person-hood, curing them of their addictions to procrastination, social media, advertised products, processed food or whatever else it might be, rather than cruelly deciding that people should be worse off and unhappier. We should help people's thoughtful, rational sides win in their lives; help their souls conquer their whims and shine freely. In just the same way that we give alcoholics disulfiram, we need disulphiram for the economy. Instead, many economists recommend more alcohol for the alcoholic, as it’s what he clearly wants and it would be patronising to think he needs anything else. Let’s have some doctors in charge instead.