Are Emotions A Useful Evolution?

Before I even begin to contemplate the slightly college freshman-esque question I have posed here I want it understood that I always answer yes. Self awareness is required for mental evolution and with self awareness must come emotion. To say otherwise is fairly ludicrous in my opinion.

But, leaving all of that aside, I’ve been having a reasonably hard time of it this semester. To say that it’s been a rough sixteen weeks seems both sarcastic and understated. I don’t know if I’ve ever, at least since I’ve become an adult, had sixteen weeks like these. None of this matters except as backstory; specifically as I attempt to push through finals week, finish grading, write a final, write a paper, put in grades, etc., it all comes down to me whining at the world. A large part of me just wants to walk away from it all with the sort of disdain and sneer only my seventeen year old self could muster.

On a side note: isn’t it odd how no matter how old we get, circumstances can still promote our teenage selves to come out and sneer at the world on occasion? Or maybe that’s just me and my perpetual immaturity.

But here’s where the question about the evolutionary wisdom of emotions comes in: life totally doesn’t care about how I feel. If one were to personify life a conversation with it would go like this:

Me: “Life, I’m really tired of this.”
Life: “Get over it.”
Me: “Why don't you care about me?! You’re no good for me! You never let me play video games or watch movies or just relax anymore!”
Life: “Bored.”
Me: “Don’t you care about me anymore?”
Life: “You got bills to pay.”

This is what I’m saying. Being an adult means you don’t get the luxury of whining anymore--well, some people certainly still whine, but it doesn’t make a difference and they shouldn’t. No matter how over it all you are you still have to do it; bills need paid, chores need done, and mothers need called. Becoming a hermit in Montana and seceding from the United States is no longer a legitimate option--if indeed it ever was. (But I had dreams! Dreams of living a life outside the bounds of the law! Dreams where I could use the Force and travel the cosmos! Wait...wrong dreams. Sorry.)

But we evolved emotions and, for myself at least, I spend a significant amount of time attempting to consciously further evolve my emotions in an attempt to better myself as a human being. Wishing to be more compassionate, more wise, more dialogic I sit around and think about things A LOT. And I have to wonder sometimes, especially when the adult side of me is required to overtake the rest of me, what is the purpose?

Consider it sincerely for a moment: leaving out all of that human condition crap and movie cliché “there’s a silver lining to every tragedy” boloney, does it not make sense from a purely evolutionary standpoint for emotions to either a) not exist or b) be more directly connected to the social stratification we are drawn to genetically? Furthermore, human society itself is caught in a Catch-22 of its own making. We must have emotions to create and improve society, but emotions limit our ability to work ourselves to death for society’s benefit (and we all know how I feel about the commodification of human beings). As a citizen, then, you end up in the untenable position of needing emotion to be a member of society and constantly fighting against those same emotions as you attempt to accomplish all that is required of you as a member of said society.

Are we all following me here?

If we cannot be human without emotion and if we all agree emotion and the evolution of emotion allows us to be better human beings, then it follows that emotion cannot be the problem. Therefore, if emotion and social duty do not coexist peacefully that would seem to imply that social duty is the problem.

Obviously we should be more like France with an automatic 6 weeks of vacation.

But being aware that something is broken both in what is expected of individual citizens and the apparatus within which the world is made does nothing but irritate me more because at the end of the day there is no other apparatus within which I might exist. That means that I have to suck it up and do what needs to be done.

Which brings us full circle to what is actually spurring this meditation on emotion this afternoon. Because society both deifies and demonizes emotion, the average person is left almost completely defenseless when it comes to the awareness, analysis, and critical contemplation of his/her own emotions. You’re told from your earliest days that you should feel like this and act like this and good people do these things and respond in these ways to situations a, b, and c. You’re also told from your earliest days that only babies cry and strong people are stoic and nobody has the patience or time for an emotional mess. Neither of these expectations can be fulfilled as no one reacts or feels the same way about anything, and no one exists successfully (not counting sociopaths) without emotion. To pretend you are without emotion or always in control of emotion is as idiotic as never being in control of emotion.

So we’re left with the middle of the road, once again, being the seemingly best option. Sometimes emotion must be shelved so action can be accomplished, but sometimes actions are not nearly so important as feelings. I knew all of this when I started, but what I’m attempting to work through is the complication of trying to figure out which situation is which.

When do you put on a happy face and make everyone else happy, and when do you take a stand and demand that life bow to you? I suppose this is what one might call the tightrope of responsibility and happiness. And, in all honesty, more often then not an individual situation is fairly easy to read--like the end of the semester. It would be the sort of stupidity that makes my father shake his head and my mother cry for me to just give up this close to the end. There isn’t really any question there about what should be done. But other situations like relationships, social obligations, or family gatherings are not so easy. Just because you feel a thing does not mean it matters or should matter and, likewise, just feeling something is sometimes reason enough.

I don’t have any answers. Where’s the Sex and the City episode about all of this?!