This topic provoked me because of how feelings felt by teenagers are often described as ''unreal''.
To make it clear, this isn't me being defensive or blindly rejecting of this description. But rather, trying to get to the bottom of it.
The fact that feelings could be ''real'' in the first place doesn't make much sense to me. What does real mean? Is it that they would have a physical existence? That would make no feelings real to begin with. Is it that everyone else would feel them too? If so, it's nearly impossible. It's rare that everyone would feel the same about one thing, let alone everything. Is it about their sincerity? Because I'm sure I'm honest with myself about my feelings and my answer is the same to myself when I ask me twice.
The very definition of feelings is quite vague, the dictionary definition (in a nutshell) was ''emotions''. And the definition of emotions did come down to ''feelings'', and in other attempts to explain both, only examples of different sentiments were given. This made me smile actually, I felt the logic was almost as clueless as I am about this and not as certain as it seemed to be. People tend to talk about this so confidently. 98% of the times when I try to discuss anything feeling related with an older person they lay in the fruit of their glorious expertise and call my feelings fake. It just made me frustrated one way or another. If everything I feel is fake then none of my feelings is of worth anyway, so my happiness isn't happiness, my sadness isn't really sadness, and my affection for another person is a mere illusion. It's all just an illusion. So I should either feel okay with living a lie (which would never happen), or lock myself up in a cellar until my feelings are real enough. The silent frustration was broken by the emerging of a third option, people's description of my emotions is not true, or rather, inaccurate.
The word ''unreal'' is very much a subconscious or inaccurate conscious replacement of ''volatile''. That would suggest that ''real'' feelings have to be everlasting in order to exist anyway. For me, or anyone else my age, most feelings do come and go easily (emphasis on most). Easier than it does for older people. So the word ''volatile'' does apply.
The thing is, even though adult feelings have a lower tendency to evaporate, they often do. The affinity for adolescent feelings to just fly away is only relative. I'm not saying that all adult feelings are unreal, I am suggesting that quite a lot are.
I still haven't been lucky enough to encounter feelings between people that I could describe as ''everlasting''.(which makes me question their existence to be honest), but I've met a few who are sincere and selfless. They felt real for some reason.
So the one measure I have so far reached for a feeling to be real is, the sincerity of it.
It does need more standards, not just for the sake of it. But for the fact that sincerity alone isn't enough. The feelings of children are sincere, but they are not always built on good enough judgement.
I don't have a strong closing statement, my thoughts always end with a question mark.
So sharing thoughts is much needed!
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4 comments:
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check your mail for my detailed comment..I thought that a mail is better than writing aother post in the place of comments !!
If you're talking about love, then my opinion is that any love that evaporates (even between adults) is not love at all. Because the love I believe in is constant and never dies.
It's not easy to understand romantic love, until you feel it. And when you do it's a new sensation, so you've got nothing to compare it against... except... well... God's love! I know that's not "visible" enough for you, but I know it has some basic traits. If a certain emotion is missing those traits, I wouldn't call it love.
Those traits include sincerity, but like you said, that's not enough.
So you need more standards, you say?
Perfect love is selfless, very kind, doesn't keep a record of how much it's been wronged from the loved one, doesn't seek revenge, and is permanent (cf 1 Cor. 13)
If all the above applies to the emotion you're trying to get to the bottom of, then the last trait (permanence) points towards the test of time. If love survives and grows, then it passed the test. I find nothing wrong with that approach.
If you were not talking about love, tell me!
...But that depends on our definition of feelings.
Alright, so the dictionaries have failed us and opted for the "a camel is what a camel looks like" method, fine, we might as well consult philosophy, i started with this page http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/emotion/ and i almost forgot the spelling of the word,so..i don't recommend it.
So let's agree between u & me on a very simple and relatively efficient definition of the word, let's say that when a chemical reaction occures between my actions (which are motivated by previous feelings) and the world's reaction to them (as perceived by me), the resultant is a feeling....well, that's not a very efficient definition of the word itself !, but at least it kinda helps us pin down what is wrong when people say a feeling is unreal, note that we're talking here about emotions, which are a subset of feelings, cause feelings is a general word that should also include the sensory ones (feelings related to the 5 senses of the apocalypse: listening, touching, seeing...etc)
So, accordingly, we can say that what u feel is quite real alright, the problem people are talking about is your perception of the world, the common notion derived from pop psychology that teenagers tend to live the melodrama, exaggerate their perception, if sth is slightly bad they become immediately depressed, if the sun shines brightly they are manically uplifted, and supposedly, this is because teenagers' perception is extremely distorted as they go through a series of biological/psychological/hullabaloo-ial changes...etc
as i said, this is just pop psychology, the kind of "science" people learn from daily papers and bad movies, sure, teenagers do experience lots of mood swings, but i suppose its a crime to categorize all their feelings under the illusion of some kind of a uniform oscillatory motion.
Your perception, on the other hand, is entirely up to you, up to the way u see life, the way u have built the world u live in, this is, simply put, the resultant of everything u have received throughout your life from reading, watching , hearing (the 5 senses again) and the only advice i can offer (other than ignoring our glorious pop-psychologists sages) is to keep learning, keep receiving, and make sure u have some sort of compass that points at a certain direction...and use it to determine how much what u're receiving deviates from that direction, what that compass may be is entirely up to u, its the one thing that no one can determine for u.
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