DailyJim: Rapid onslaught of emotions

Hello everyone welcome to another daily gym this is the episode for thursday april 11th 2024 today i want to talk about the rapid onslaught of emotions, so for those who don't know rapid onslaught i believe is a term that's often used for Or rapid succession, like a very quick series of punches or hits, attacks, often used in terms of war, combat, and things like that. That's my guess. I looked it up and I think that's kind of what it is.

But, so to tell a story. So right before this episode, I wasn't sure what I was going to talk about. And then I opened up the app Threads. And I came across a video where they said it was a 92 year old man saying goodbye to his little brother and you see the man stand up from his wheelchair and go over to the hospital bed and give his what we assume to be his younger brother a hug and say a few words and hold their heads close to each other and even describing it to you is bringing tears to my eyes again.

And the video finished, and I scrolled down, and the next thing I saw was a white, fluffy dog. A small, fluffy, white dog with an orange butterfly on its nose, and it was moving its head back and forth to try to get the butterfly off or see what was going on. And I stopped at that and I thought, let me record this episode. But if I would have kept scrolling, maybe there would have been something about politics in there. Maybe there would have been something about, who knows what, the death of O.J. Simpson, which happened today, many of the things.

And it's just but just those two just the deep sadness to this kind of fluffy playful dog, it i don't know if we human beings okay let me say this i feel very confident we human beings weren't built for dealing with such a rapid onslaught of emotion it is hard to deal with with being in a room of people and having to deal with the emotions that are happening in the room but now that we have access to twitter or whatever people want to call it these days or have access to threads or have access to reddit or have access to really anything on the internet youtube my goodness or tiktok it can jump from one thing to another thing so quickly we have access to the emotional experiences of so many humans limit almost, you know, I don't know how many humans are on the internet and posting, but, I don't know if we've.

Trained to deal with emotions hitting us this quickly. And I think we haven't. And I think what happens most of the time is that we look at a newspaper article or we look at a blog post or we look at a TikTok or we look at a video on YouTube or we see something on Twitter and we feel something. And then we look at another one and we feel another thing. Then we look at another thing and we feel another thing and we feel, feel, feel, feel, feel. But we aren't aware that we're We're feeling these things in such quick succession, and we often just kind of push them down. Maybe we want to reply, and then we go, oh, no, but maybe I can't type that quickly on my phone, or maybe I'm afraid if I post this, then other people might respond to it, or I really want to say what's really going on with me, but then maybe people in my life don't want me sharing that publicly, and so many reasons that we don't actually express it. That we just kind of receive it, but we don't give the emotion out.

And so it's almost like going onto the internet is we're just getting pelted with different emotional experiences.

Other people are just projecting and emoting or transferring or just like emotional contagion, just basically infecting us with the emotion that they're feeling. Feeling and then we have other emotions that pop up as a result and and then we go okay and then you know people say oh people aren't sleeping well because they're looking at the blue screen the blue light from their phones and i'm thinking no it's because they just watched something that ripped them apart emotionally and they were not dealing with it and then we just like okay go to sleep like what what how do we watch a video of this man saying goodbye and then watch something think about Israel and Palestine and then watch, you know, maybe somebody being killed and then watch a dog playing with a butterfly and then watch, see a beautiful photo of the eclipse and then see all these different things and then just think that we're not having this huge emotional experience while using our phones or using the internet in general.

So I just wanted to pause and reflect a little bit about how.

I think we're getting hit with emotions all the time. When I say being hit with, I mean kind of like getting, look at me snapping. I'm on a phone. I don't know if you can hear the snaps.

Being, people call it triggered. I don't think it's triggered.

It's evoking, like evoking a lot of things in us pretty nonstop, especially when we're interacting with something at such a high rate like TikTok what 20 second 30 second videos if you listen if you watch the whole thing otherwise you swipe just the the rapid succession of with of which we can experience these different contexts and feelings is something that I just don't think we've ever really had in human history. And uh yeah but at the same time we think oh life really isn't that different than what it was before i mean yeah i think humanity in some ways is very similar throughout the ages and i don't think we've ever had something like this before in human history to this level so yeah they say social media is really causing a lot of emotional problems for us but i think one of the biggest these problems is that we are receiving all this stuff and then we're not expressing it we're not getting it out so we're just kind of i hate this phrase catching feelings i use it in a different way right kind of like actually receiving um feelings and then not expressing them so bottling them up in a way anyways it's the end of the week i'm kind of tired and uh yeah i still have have the lingering spatial awareness of the eclipse and maybe i'll talk about something else about the eclipse next week so that's a heavy uh heavy sigh on that note take care y'all talk to you all on monday bye.