QC

"Positive" and "negative" are in quotes because the story that some emotions are "positive" and others are "negative" is itself part of the problem. Emotions don't work that way. We absolutely need to feel all of it. Including resistance and dissociation.

Emotional suppression slowly corrodes you. It saps your motivation. It weakens your immune system. It tenses your muscles. You become sicker, more anxious, more depressed, more numb. Your energy is tied up at war with itself instead of flowing out into the world.

Emotional suppression also cuts you off from a key component of your discernment, your sense-making, your meaning-making, your knowing. You lose sight of what's important. You become distractible and distracted. You become vulnerable to manipulation.

This is one of the parts of modern dystopia I hate the most, because IMO it's one of the key components propping up the rest of it. When you've learned to cut yourself off from fear and sadness and anger, you've also cut yourself off from love and caring and wisdom.

How can you step up to serve the world with joy in your heart if you can't feel your heart in the first place? You can't, and it would be cruel to ask you to.

When you can't feel yourself, you can't feel other people either. A life spent numb is a life where it feels like nobody else actually exists and nothing actually matters. Now imagine that many of the most powerful people in the world are in this position.

That scares me, the idea that the people with their hands on the levers actually cannot feel themselves or anyone else. It would explain a lot, though. Nothing left to do but chase power and status, in a world like that. I imagine it's an incredibly lonely place to be.

So, this is my take, the take that's such a background component of how I relate to the world and what a mess it's in that I forget to actually say it: We will never deal with AI or climate change or the culture war or whatever else until we relearn how to simply feel.