5:00PM
I want to follow up on what I wrote this afternoon. While I do not believe much in trickle down economics, I do believe strongly in another TDE: trickle down emotions.
Another way to say that is, “How I feel, others are likely to feel.” If I’m feeling angry, others are likely to feel angry. If I feel excited, others are likely to feel excited. If I feel confident, others are likely to feel confident.
The essence of a con artist is the confidence trick, where one exudes a certain amount of confidence and makes the other person feel confident. Perhaps not a perfect example, because one way to make someone else feel so confident may be the opposite of exuding it but exuding the opposite. A person may pretend to play poorly at pool, only to increase the wager and take your money later—building up on confidence in you then taking it.
So perhaps the confidence trick doesn’t explain it well and provides a counterexample. I do believe that it happens though. Another example would be if I come home from work and I’m angry at my boss. My expressing anger at my boss will lead me to get into an angry tone of voice, my heart will start to pump faster, and overall I’m likely to find more and more things irritable. If I then engage with someone at home, they may catch those feelings (as Drake said?) and start to feel angry as well. I see this with uncertainty a lot—one person will freak out and then other people start to freak out as well.
While on the surface it may look as if the feelings are not being reciprocated, as in the example of the confidence trick, I wonder if the feelings are felt deep down but then quickly counteracted. For example, if someone is freaking out from anxiety, I may feel the anxiety inside and have a different emotional reaction to it. Maybe I’ll feel calm after feeling the anxiety, realizing it’s not such a big deal. Maybe I’ll get angry at feeling anxiety or maybe even sad.
Even as I write these entries, I wonder what emotions I’m conveying to the reader. If I continue down the path of self-reflection, introspection, and open questioning, does that lead the reader to feel the uncertainty and doubt that I’m experiencing? If so, how do they respond to that feeling? Do they feel it and embrace it or have a different emotional reaction to it?
Perhaps some people may not like the level of uncertainty I’m expressing here. I’ve used the words “maybe,” “perhaps,” and “wonder” a lot, among others, to express that I don’t know, I’m merely exploring different topics live. Some may catch that and not appreciate it.
Again, back to the original point, trickle down emotions: how I feel, others are likely to feel. It doesn’t mean that they’ll feel it and it doesn’t mean that if they do feel it, that they’ll stay in that feeling for a while and not go to another one.
I recall when I started Emotional Self-Defense. A friend said, “I liked it because you seemed to like it.”
5:10PM
