Emotional Consistency — A criminally underrated virtue
Emotions are a handful. A human goes through a myriad of emotions every single day, and this is even those that have a seemingly normal life. But the problem is that you never really feel an emotion from its start to end. Well, I might have exaggerated. Maybe we do, sometimes. Rarely. When they need to be felt. I do not think that this is our fault per se. You see, society has evolved to a stage in our evolution that life has become mechanised. And when there are routine, mechanical operations to do, there is not much time to be spent on dwelling on fleeting emotions. Fleeting emotions. That right there is the problem. All emotions we feel nowadays are fleeting. Anger, sadness, love, hatred, euphoria — all of them have been reduced to ephemeral wisps. Disappearing and reappearing without connection, devoid of meaning.
The problem with fleeting emotions is that the actions that are borne out of them are also fleeting in their conviction. Society’s problem is that it feels collectively sad, angry, happy but briefly. Like a toddler who’s attention is wavers constantly, in and out, in and out without pattern and without purpose, society weans in and out of what seems to be the “trendy emotion” of the season. The result is that you are basically an unanchored ship. You have no reference to what you feel. You go through it, without thought, without purpose. I would reiterate here that the onus of this is not completely on the mass. It is partly on how we are prodded to feel these emotions. Information is being broadcast at a rate that is unprecedented, making peole focus all their attention on receving that information and moving on. Very little time is then afforded the recepient to absorb, dissect and investigate and then allow feeling to be a consequence of information and not a pre-requisite. Of course, surface level prodding occurs. Here I must again invoke the example of a toddler meddling with stuff till something else catches his attention. Whatever occupied him in the present moment has lost its appeal and now there are newer pastures to be arrived at.
There is a caveat with such surface-level approach to life. Of course, one huge caveat is already that you scamper from emotion to emotion, each one leaving you as confused as the other. But the biggest loss is the ability to be consistent with your mental state. Lets assume for argument’s sake that Climate Change is a very emotional subject for me (it is, but lets treat it as a hypothesis). Now, given society’s current Modus Operandi of reactions, I would probably be triggered if I saw an article about some place on Earth recording its highest temperature ever seen. I would probably be pissed off. I would share this on social media, talk about it to a few friends and then think about a while. Then it would disappear. Its not as if I do not feel passionate about it anymore — but clearly, this short nose-dive into emotional turbulence has been of very litle utlitity. To both Earth’s climate change and me. I would then move on to the next item of the day, with little care for the emotional state I just left — that of anger and frustration that global warming is creeping on us, every day.
But there is no time! There is no time to feel that emotion, savour it and get to the bottom of it. Life awaits. There are bills to pay, work unattended, friends to meet, obligations to be fulfilled, and simply too much to be done. On top of this, there are also other emotional states — Police brutality, War, Poverty, Hunger — the list is non-exhaustive. And here is where, I think consistency is vital. Give your mind time. Be gentle with it. Let it absorb. There is so much pressure in this world to have an emotional response to everything. The idea is not that an emotional response is wrong. It is that short bursts of emotional eruption are unlikely to yield any benefit. And when you feel many emotions, your actions are weaker and lack the tenacity to see any one particular emotion through.
The remedy is to follow an emotion. Sit with it, allow it to settle. Let it find stable ground but keep it alive. Water it, every day. I do not mean here that if you are sad and morose you should keep being sad and morose. Far from it. I mean that if you do not investigate the sadness, it is likely it will come again, make you sad for a while and move on. Like a carousel, you will keep going round and round and this carousel will not stop because it will not run out of power. And when it is finally time to get off, little has been done other than hopping from seat to seat just to grab the aura. Mass media is bringing all the world’s troubles to your shores and as a decent person, you feel the need to harbour those troubles as your own — and of course you do. The bitter pill to swallow is that your time is not effectively used harbouring all of them. In doing so you will have been none the wiser, and the world, none the better.
Be consistent with your emotion. This does not mean stay with the same emotion. But follow it, see where it leads.
You will soon realize in being consistent, your actions have more meaning. Your net contribution to the world is positive — instead of neutral and sometimes even being detrimental. Social Media has made it impossible to achieve this consistency. We have become so confused and yet so opinionated. So uninformed, yet sure of our convictions. It is of no surprise then that attention spans are shorter and societal reforms superficial. The same cycles repeat, over and over — because the remedies are temporary. They are temporary because the motivation and conviction behind those remedies are half-hearted. Therefore, instead of focussed actionable emotion exercised by pockets of people towards a cause, there is dissonant haphazard emotion being exercised by mass.
The benefit of this is for those people that wish to make use of this fault line. They know that societal action comes in short angry bursts. They know that by the time these bursts accumulate to a level wherein there is no option but for systemic change, they will have reaped what they sowed.
I must at this point, present a counter-view to my own argument. Mass communication and globalisation has not been in total vain. It has made it possible to spread information to a large amount of people at such speed that action can sometimes be swift and precise. In the recent past, various instances, the most recent one being the global uprising for Black Lives Matter has shown that it in those cases, breaching point has been reached. Pushed enough, things will change. All it takes is one good man to die, even though many died before that and many fights were fought before that and many will be fought long after we are gone. However, these actions are again burts that must be sustained. We forget a lot, very quickly. In fact, we are lucky that there are such pockets of people in the world who will take this emotion further, build on it and see it through to the end and not succumb to emotional upheaval for the sake of —What you do must trascend what you feel . And that is our only salvation.
And this why I feel Consistency is so criminally underrated in our way of living. Fleeting, un-sustained emotions reign making us feel as though we are doing a lot when we are not actually doing a lot. We are feeling a lot, but doing? Not really. In order to do, we must take that torch with us every night and forage into the same terrible place to action what we feel. And every day, bit by bit, change will be achieved.
They say very rightly Rome was not built in a day. They didn’t envision — they built. They did not draw out plans of various intricate details and move on to their next fascination — they built. Maybe in those times, humans saw their dreams out till the end. They felt in full, and they felt it every day.
Praveen Sridharan