Tag: emotions and culture

Do not swallow the pill, This condensed mass of powder That the world has convinced you Will “fix” you, your “problematic” self My darling, you are not broken You are not lost, you are not crumpled You are merely a being living In a society, in a culture That you were never meant to be forced into

From On Being: "I don’t need to look far for the source of my opinions about emotions. Then, as now, I lived in a...

I believe the emotions of guilt and shame are culturally induced negative emotional experiences that almost all of us are tragically made to feel from infancy or childhood on. But guilt and shame are not now, nor ever were, hard-wired human emotional necessities.

In The Atlantic, Julie Beck interviews emotional intelligence expert David Caruso about the importance of accurately recognizing and communicating your emotions. “American culture demands that the answer to the question ‘How are you?’ is not just ‘Good,’ but sometimes ‘Great.’ Or—this drives folks around the world crazy, who might be based in another country but they work for an American company—we need to be ‘Awesome.’ There's this relentless drive to mask the expression of our true underlying feelings. It's almost inappropriate.”