Monday, November 10, 2008

It's just emotions..

I read a recent article which quizzed me on our human ability to feel and contemplate emotions and what was my grasp on my own emotions. Upon some answering and inner meditation, it proved to be quite a revelation.
Be true to yourself and try to answer these:
1. Firstly, how many emotions have you felt in the past 24 hours?
2. Name all the emotions in your dictionary of emotions?
3. Why the (big) difference - if any?

So I answered them:
1. Happy (that I was spending time with my family), hysterical (when my crazy cousins started making below-15-yr-old jokes), lame(nothing unusual there), angry(traffic..), mundane(waiting.. on the world to change), excited(because I bought some cheap cool gadgets!), proud (because I found out my body could do some things others can't. STOP right there if your mind was going on the road less taken.)
2. (Aside from the ones I've mentioned) Ecstatic, confused, lonesome, depressed, down, overjoyed, mischevious,  I need a thesaurus.
3. I dunno, you're supposed to tell me, aren't you?



I read on. Imagine this, there was a scientific theory that basically says that you are only able to experience the emotion that your mind is able to label with a word. In other words, if you have a limited vocabulary, you will have limited emotions you can feel and more importantly understand. Haven't we seen many a time in movies where the character says, "I don't know why I'm feeling this way.." or "I just can't put my finger on it..".
For the benefit of the doubt of the scriptwriters, I highly doubt their limited vocabulary is the main reason rather than for the scene itself.

What came to mind were Chinese shows and how they mostly had plots relatively shallow to their Western counterparts. Then you start to think how Chinese label their emotions. For eg, sad (EN) would be Sam Tong (Heart Pain, CN). My chinese ain't the best in the world but I know that English has almost a few thousand words expressing emotion while chinese are one third that number.

The point is, we humans brag about our "ability to feel" and all that but how many of us are making the best of it all? Maybe we all should get that shirt with those faces, eh?

2 comments:

lookenneth said...

Working life got into you huh?

justinwong said...

Yeah man, goodstuff though, you only get to work your ass off in one stage in your life and it ain't in the 50s region la u know what i mean.

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