Belly Button Lint

Feeling Lint-y?

Tag: emotions

  • Theme:

    we are depressed, not repressed

    , , ,

    °

    1–2 minutes

    Today we suffer from depression rather than repression.

    No one reading this is repressed despite the popular psychotherapeutic convenience of thinking so. Over the last 100 years, we have deconstructed and expanded "normalization" and "freedom," replacing both with a narcissistic psycho-politics of persistent self-evaluation and optimization.

    We can do anything but are so burnt out that we collapse under the extreme freedom of choice, which never leads to restoration.
    (idea from Byung-Chul Han )
    –
    –
    –

  • Theme:

    emotional triage

    , , ,

    °

    1–2 minutes

    External problems often require categorizing their quantity, quality, severity, or magnitude. We can perform triage to organize and prioritize by converting these logical abstractions into relative ranking.

    However, internally (psychologically and emotionally), we are incapable of logically ranking each predicament or distress: an argument with your boss or spouse is equally as influential on our decision being hungry. (see Daniel Kahneman)

    More importantly, we seldom recognize our emotional or psychological state, allowing it to creep into influencing our external evaluations (affecting our effects).

  • Theme:

    Intensity: Quantity vs Magnitude

    , , ,

    °

    1–2 minutes

    Henri Bergson reminds us that intensity, particularly in feelings, is less about measurable quantity and more about qualitative magnitude.

    Emotions (feelings) resist precise calculation; they unfold as experiences shaped by perception, memory, and context. While we can measure stress hormones or neural activity, these fail to capture the totality of intensity: the combination of variables in context amplifying each other.

    Our tendency toward availability bias skews this even further, as the present moment overshadows past incidents. Reflection and detachment may help recalibrate our sense of proportion, but to focus on any one event is to empower it beyond measure.

  • Theme:

    Facism: aestheticization of politics

    , , ,

    °

    1–2 minutes

    Fascism is fear and pain amplified until we beg for strength to save us.
    Fear is created through a conspiracy without facts: we can protest for our rights without affecting change. In this neutered, weakened state, we turn towards strength, even if it is only an image of strength, a memory of power.
    Once affiliated, communally anxious quick fixes are applied: symbolic interactions and stylistic switches. Watchwords, repetitious dogma, flags, and costuming precede conversation, curiosity, or insight. In so doing, we sacrifice self to the tribe.
    What must be considered is that we would love to remain individuals, strange and selfish, but when stripped and trapped, we will turn back to primal instinct and scapegoating. The reason for fear is because it is natural.

    "Benjamin said that fascism tends towards an aestheticization of politics, in the sense of a spectacle in which it allows the masses to express themselves without seeing their rights recognized, and without affecting the relations of ownership which the proletarian masses aim to eliminate." ~ The aestheticization of politics, wikipedia
    –
    –
    –

  • Theme:

    Political disgust as pleasure

    , , ,

    °

    1–2 minutes

    Political anxiety and disgust can transform into a source of enjoyment, where emotional investment—"libidinal investment"—eclipses rational thought. This emotionalism drives an addictive engagement with conflict, prioritizing outrage over reason because one derives "perverse" pleasure.
    from Slavoj Zizek
    –
    –
    –

  • Theme:

    Gusts of Doubt

    , , ,

    °

    1–2 minutes

    Even at the peak of your balance and focus (your finely honed stability), take enough gusts, and you will look down.

    It is not looking around that leads to dismay, but rather the clarity of unfocused observation that leads to doubt. Widening your view recognizes the precarious fragility of our position.

    Recognition should invoke a fight-or-flight response, but often, we freeze wide-eyed when our ignorance is made plain, preventing us from returning to the stable, narrow focus that served us so well.

  • Theme:

    Pain is shared

    , , ,

    °

    1–2 minutes

    Pain surrounds us in many forms—loss, death, and the recognition of our own inaction. While death, breakups, and moving are known as life’s most stressful events, watching someone else suffer can be even more agonizing. Their pain, delusion, and inevitable self-destruction mirror our own struggles, leaving us powerless, which amplifies our pain.

    This pain sits heavy in our chest, a signal something is deeply wrong, so we work to dislodge it, to shake it off by thrashing and acting out.

    Pain, both physical and emotional, may start as centripetal (focussing down to a central point) but becomes centrifugal (spreading out) from a broken heart or cut to sweating and shaking to involving others. Pain is shared.

    (partially from Henry Bergson, William James)

  • Theme:

    Tracing Triggers

    , , ,

    °

    1–2 minutes

    We must trace the outburst when we act out, lash out, or are triggered.

    You can ask: "When was the last time I felt this?" or "When did this happen to me as a child?" Yet, the knowledge alone will not heal you. Intellectual answers only prepare you to come to terms with the emotional pain. Inside this pain, the emotion you have traced, you can finally allow yourself to forgive yourself for the hurt others caused.

  • Theme:

    Manifesting Positivity in Tough Times

    , , ,

    °

    1–2 minutes

    Given our bleak and contracting economic and political landscape, we are increasingly told to “manifest our destiny” through hope and positivity. We should vote for “joy.”

    To rely on positivity for survival is akin to prayer: a placebo for a tool. Instead of relying on the hard work of a meritocratic existence, agency escapes us, leaving us only psychological coping mechanisms: giddy, blind optimism ignoring reality in favor of insane positivity.

    Indeed, our mutability to parrot glee in the face of hardship is directly proportional to our fear: we will say, do, or be anything to survive, no matter how outragious.

    –

    –
    –

  • Theme:

    Mindful to Mindless

    , , ,

    °

    1–2 minutes

    Being mindful means not being distracted by your mind, emotions, fears, or concerns but being in the present, undistracted.

    The conundrum is to consider the undistracted state, mindful, as "mindless" since we are not actively engaged in thinking or doing. However, to give yourself over to a torrent of emotions and frivolous thoughts is an animalistic state, mindless and without control, completely captured by impulse and reaction.