This Time With Feeling

This is one of those posts that would normally start with "maybe it's just me..." but in this case, I suspect that it might actually just be me, so there's no need to be coy about it. A couple of years ago, I noted that, as a teenager, I'd had my first run-in with kidney stones, and due to my own ignorance, spent a very long night convinced that I was going to die after a nurse was late with replacing an IV drip that I'd been placed on. Quite obviously (I think), I didn't die. And, interestingly, I didn't find that I was really afraid of dying anymore. Not that I ran out to take up base jumping or alligator-wresting or anything crazy like that, but the idea that dying, in and of itself, was something to be afraid of, had just quietly left the building.

A side effect of this is that certain topics (recent police shootings and the pandemic, for starters) don't really have the emotional resonance for me that they appear to for other people. I've understood this or a while, but I never really took the time to really consider the upshot of that. I was out walking in the woods today, and I was considering the idea that people are rarely motivated to make major changes in their lives minus the presence of strong emotions. And this lead me to think about what drives the mechanics of change.

Not being a fan of constant solicitations, I tend to avoid donating to charities unless I can do so anonymously. After all, I went to a single political fundraiser (where anonymity is not allowed) back in 2004, and I'm still receiving pitches for donations, despite not having ever written a second check or answered any of the messages. But still, I like to find ways to help out worthy causes. And one day I asked myself how I made the determination of worthiness. So, as an experiment, I set out to find a charity that struck me as worthy, yet was engaged in work that I otherwise didn't care about. Or, perhaps more accurately, was engaged in solving a problem or engaged with a constituency that I wasn't at all invested in. It didn't take me long to find a local charity that fit the bill, and make a one-of donation. It was a process that seemed oddly flat, if that word makes any sense in this context. While I'm not the sort to become worked up at the prospect of saving the world, I tend to derive a certain sense of satisfaction from being helpful to others. But in this instance, while I understood that I was helping, it didn't feel particularly useful. It was just a thing that I was doing because I'd told myself that I was going to do it.

Now, to be sure, that's a perfectly legitimate reason to do things. There are times when I'm not particularly motivated to write anything here. But I wind up working something up because I'd told myself that I was going to maintain a particular cadence of posts and so I post, even when, looking back on the post later, I definitely have the feeling that I phoned it in. I can tell which posts I was really engaged with, and which ones I likely could have completely skipped.

And maybe that's why emotion is such a powerful driver of action; it bypasses the need to create a certain discipline about things. Someone whose reaction to a particular event is: "Must. Denounce. Now." is going to have a much easier time writing about it, or taking other actions, than someone who sees it as perhaps regrettable, but otherwise takes it in stride. And this might be a reason why so many people are attached to their emotional responses to events; the whirlwind of activity that a strong emotional response can produce is something that valuable to them.

For myself, I think I value the time and effort that I put into pushing myself to keep up with this. While there are times when it feels less like discipline, and more like an unwelcome compulsion, I like to think that I'm still able to approach it rationally. But I understand that there are times when my lack of emotional connection to certain events or possibilities leaves people with the impression than I'm completely disinterested. Sometimes, that even includes me.