Category: Fear

What Is The Right Amount Of Emotion?

Emotion can be good; emotion can be bad.

Being emotional is what makes life worth living. The happiness you feel in the presence of a loved one. The satisfaction of a job well done. The beauty of nature. The awe-inspiring stars on a clear night.

All of these experiences are dependent on emotion. You can be inspired, feel joy, suffer from heartache. Without feelings, life would be dull and uninteresting.

And yet, emotion can also lead us astray. Being passionate can blind you to a necessary choice. Grief can overcome you and lead to depression. Extreme feelings can make you easier to manipulate.

It’s not about “good” feelings, like love and joy, vs “bad” feelings, like anger and fear. You will experience negative emotions over the course of your life. It is not practical to pretend they don’t exist. Negative or bad emotions are just as much of a fully-realized emotional life as positive ones are.

No, the real trade-off is between emotion and logic. Logic might help make better decisions, but feelings give flavor to existence. There must be a middle ground. It is important to balance some emotion with some reason.

But how can you find the right balance? How can you make the most of your feelings and fully live your life, but also make rational decisions and think analytically?

What is the right amount of emotion? How can you tell if you have too much? What mechanisms allow you to increase or decrease the emotion you feel every day?

Related questions: Why does music evoke emotion? What is necessary to change your mind? What do you do that you shouldn’t? How does creative expression help us to know ourselves better?

What Makes Us Comment On Social Media?

My proposed question is: What makes us comment on social media?

When we see a post on Facebook or other social media, why do we comment? Is it usually a visceral reaction? What makes us hold back from sharing our thoughts?

Many times I have spent 2-10 minutes crafting a response to something to ultimately decide not to post it. Sometimes it’s because I think my comment is controversial and I don’t want to offend anyone. I also don’t want to track the comment and follow up on others responses. Sometimes it’s because I don’t know the person well enough and suddenly feel it is not my place to contribute.

Often, on Intellectual Roundtable, I feel my desired responses are actually just more questions without conclusions so I don’t think I should share those. I also feel the void when I put something out into the world and no one responds. When participating in conversations in person, with strangers or friends, I am much more likely to voice my thoughts because I know I am likely to get a response.

Since I wrote this I’m going to submit it, but I oddly thought at the very end here I should delete the whole question. It feels really obvious and suddenly not like an intellectual question at all but just a way to feed the ego.

Perhaps this is why I don’t post many personal things on social media! 🙂

Related questions: What do you get out of social media? What social media platforms do you use? Why do we care what strangers think of us? How can we build confidence?

Why Are People Afraid Of Death?

Death is something that we all have in common. We all know people who have died, and we will all die ourselves. It doesn’t matter what your race, the amount of money or power you have, or what country you come from. We may be able to postpone death, but it will come for us all eventually.

Because of this, death appears quite often in art, literature, movies, and other social platforms. One of the most common reactions to the possibility of death is that of fear. People are scared at the idea of no longer being alive. Not fear regarding a violent or unhappy death, which would obviously be unpleasant and should be avoided, but at the simple fact of no longer being alive.

Should people be afraid? In media, it is also common to point out that life is difficult, and a struggle, and often unfair. It often requires hard work to succeed, and even that doesn’t guarantee anything. Why should anyone fear that coming to an end?

No one seems to think about the time before they were born as being lonely, or with any regret, or sadness. Why should the time after they die be one that should be feared?

What happens when we die is a mystery, although there are no shortage of ideas. Some believe in a spiritual afterlife filled with reward for the just, and punishment for the wicked. Others think we are reincarnated and come back to do it all over again. Some think we simply cease to be, and death is the end of an individual. Or do we come back as ghosts and haunt the living?

That sense of unknown may be what gives rise to fear. We often fear what we don’t know or don’t understand. Maybe some of us like our lives and regret losing out on what we already have. Or maybe the fear comes from imagining the grief experienced by those we leave behind.

What’s your theory? Why are people afraid of death?

Related questions: What happens when we die? What is time? What do we have in common? What beliefs do you have that might be wrong?

How Do You Know Who To Trust?

Navigating today’s world can be confusing. It is not possible to verify everything you hear or read. To function, you need to trust some people and some sources. Which ones? How can you judge if a person is trustworthy? How can you tell if a headline, or an article, or a website, or an entire news source should be believed?

How do you know who to trust?

Related questions: How can you repair broken trust? What is real? How can you get someone to trust you? What is necessary to change your mind?

How Can We Build Confidence?

You need a certain amount of confidence to do anything that involves some risk, like speaking in public, starting a business, righting a wrong, or standing up for yourself or for others. Why will your book, or blog, or podcast, or request for a raise, succeed? You need to have confidence that what you are doing is worthwhile.

Often, perhaps too often, lacking confidence in our ideas or our talents prevents us from taking risks, and while that might keep us from failing it also keeps us from stretching and doing something worthwhile.

How can we get past this? How can we build confidence?

Related questions: How do you define success? When is it useful to fail? Why do we care what strangers think of us? Why do we put up with unhappiness?