Is Intellectualizing the source of all suffering?
If you clicked on this thinking this would be a super philosophical article, It’s not. I’m just bored. But it’s a good read (i think)
Let’s start with Socrates, one of the best philosophers of our time (if he ever existed lmao) who said: “An unexamined life is not worth living.” something which is objectively a fact but it’s important to draw boundaries on what to examine and to what extent
Intellectualizing emotions are supposed to stop impulsive actions, prevent irrational decisions, extract valuable information from emotional experiences or even perhaps directly serve as a coping mechanism or in worse cases as a defence mechanism
But hey let’s intellectualize this article now (ironic) and take a step back to ponder.
Is intellectualizing emotions really the optimal way to process these emotions? What most people seem to miss on is that our emotions serve a really important purpose, and one which is far more important than rationality.
Human beings are irrational and emotional by nature unlike logical computers and need to feel emotions in their RAW form. Intellectualizing emotions means you don’t live them through. It’s a form of bottling up your emotions which isn’t healthy in the long run. It’s as if you say “it doesn’t make sense to be angry” or “anger leads to nothing, so why don’t just stop?” which doesn’t change the fact that anger is a vital emotion and bottling it up i.e, intellectualizing it, is pointless and harmful.
Emotions aren’t meant to be logical. They are messy, and that’s exactly the beauty of it. Nowadays, Intellectualizing emotion has become so common that people rarely let themselves be themselves; express themselves in their true nature or let their instinct guide the way.
Does remind me of this meme I saw the other day “You are too busy intellectualizing that you do not let the depth of your emotions to move you to action”. That was sort of the inspiration to this article
Never mind that, I brought it up so I could discuss a reply I found under that meme interesting and It had a valid point (super rare to find on the internet nowadays) , “Acting according to emotions can be misleading”.
Well let me begin discourse in this way: Human being were ooga booga monkeys who had no brains and acted from instinct.
Emotions are only misleading if they put you in immediate danger or rather, emotions are neither inherently misleading nor always helpful to put it in a better way.
They might be portrayed as misleading in a society that wants science (like ours) to lead us instead of our hearts (i.e, emotions) starting from diets that work for all to GMO foods engineered to be “better” than nature can provide, to grouping people into categories and then educating you on how to treat and understand the particular groups of people. These methods don’t work because people are so different from each other with a combination of millions of traits from many categories that they cannot possibly be fit into a single category.
What used to be perceived as being a absolute dick of a human being is now being justified as “not their fault”. The traits of narcissism used to be education of how people can be, and here is what you do to protect yourself from them. Now it is being determined they have reason to treat you the way they do, and where our emotions would protect ourselves in these instances, we are being told to accept them as they are and have sympathy for them because they were treated poorly during childhood and it’s not their fault.
It is only the perspective, perception, and misunderstanding of emotions can be misleading, not the emotions themselves.
intellectualizing in human relationships can create barriers to intimacy and empathy. By analyzing every interaction instead of simply experiencing your feelings, you can miss out on genuine connections and love. The more you do this stuff the smaller your range of emotions grow and the more you think the more anxiety and stress you are subjected to. relying solely on intellectualizing as a coping mechanism might be the cause of suffering, that didn’t even need to exist in the first place. It’s a useful tool but it isn’t meant to be used all the time. Honestly there’s only a few scenarios I could name off the top of my head
Intellectualizing, in my opinion, leads to a sort of situation of identity loss, your action and your emotions make you what you are, if all us were hell bent on doing the right thing, making the right decisions all the time none of us would be unique and we’d just be a society of rag-dolls working under some sort of code (hey maybe I’m foreshadowing), When you prioritize analyzing your emotions, you feel disconnected from your own inner world which leads to a sense of numbness and hey, once again, more suffering
It’s an important under-addressed topic with our generation where people don’t really have real problems but create suffering from intellectualizing or even if they do, they increase the depth of it so greatly by just OVER-ANALYSING every aspect of it. Many deep, weighty concepts notably gaslighting is just thrown around lightly to create problems by victimizing themselves out of no fucking where. “oh he said <totally viable statement that the given person disagrees with>?? He’s gaslighting you!!!” the developing culture is stupid that somehow makes the concept of suffering cool and fun.
In conclusion here’s a quote “If you’re trying to do the right thing all the time your life is just a test, and tests are one of the most stressful periods of our school. You don’t wanna be stressed all the time that’s why I just do what I feel” (it went something like that I’m writing this whole thing off memory at night cant be assed to look it up) Kanye puts it best. Fuck the world. Fuck everyone. Fuck society. Be yourself buddy. They’ll like you for what you are. Or not. But hey at least you’re yourself. nice improvement.