Law 6: Context
Law 8: Trust
More emotions are better than less.
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41 Responses to “Law 7: Emotion”
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NOTE: I reserve the right to edit or delete inappropriate comments. But I'm also a believer in free speech. Keep it simple.
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This one is ambiguous, to me. Are you saying that more emotion *is* better than less, or that more emotions are better than *fewer*? Is it about the amount, the quantity, or both?
Doug, That’s an important thought. Total amount versus quantity of discrete events. I’m personally of the total amount persuasion, but I can imagine that frequency can sometimes have a bigger effect. Quality also comes into play regardless. Thanks, John
deppends about emmotions quality
More preferred emotions (to achieve certain goal), I guess.
I love the inclusion of the topic emotion, in the discussion of simplicity. Usually people think of emotion in terms of complexity, so the idea that emotion can be simple, is enlightening. Trusting your instincts and using your feelings to navigate the world can make your day easier.
the words of your seventh law are anything but simple. maybe that’s why i am confused. i’ll skip the quality and quantity issues and mention “better” instead: better for one’s mental health, social life, professional status?? perhaps the issue is diversity, and spontaneity and change (and not getting stuck in one kind of emotion)? depression, for example, is getting stuck in sadness or despair, and then feeling sad about feeling so sad. a self-perpetuating emotional monocrop. and someone who is in zoloft-happyland all the time can be a real bore to be around. (hey, i am from n.y.) young children don’t hold on to feelings as much as adults. they transition through happiness and sadness and envy and fear etc. toggling quite rapidly.
Thanks for helping me to clarify. I refer to the situation of adults, instead of children, and the positive, instead of negative, emotions. Lara’s interpretation is closer to what I was after.
There is a powerful philosphy of retail design; which is that people buy things because of how they make them feel. People don’t necessarily make purchases because they need something, or because it is within their price range. We keep this in mind during design phase. We don’t worry about the budget; we focus on whether or not we like what we’re making.
It is a mistake to discount the “negative” emotions because they also guide us.
Right; don’t discount the negative: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/LoudThinking/~3/40830615/000601.html
Emotions are conditioned responses. Conditioned responses “that are attentively maintained” simplify.
Aside from some fear and anger responses, that are primal, our bodies are responding to an event based upon a past experience.
These responses are simplifying if our past experiences are fair representations of current experiences. When there is consistency between past and present events, our emotions guide us well.
The danger comes from a tendency for us to over generalize. When we over generalize we become controlled by “prejudice”. Our decisions become based on emotional responses founded in past experiences that are no longer relevent.
I would apply a few of the previous rules to emotions.
Reduce: What emotions can i do without? jealosy? self-pity?
Organize: When is it appropriate or inappropriate to apply them?
Time: Invest some time in creating time saving conditioned responses. Practice, drill, rehearse.
Learn: What is my stimulus for this emotional response? Is it still valid?
Differences: When is cognition more appropriate?
This is probably a bit left-brained for a discussion on emotions.
Yes, “prejudice” is such a dangerous state of mind. It’s completely artificial as you point out.
Thanks for your left-brained points up there and weaving emotions into the rest of the Laws. Left-brainedness helps us to think with razor-sharp clarity; right-brainedness helps us to deeply reflect on those thoughts. Pink’s book helped me see that both sides create an important picture of the whole.
I’ve just found another lovely example of more emotion in the context of symplicity — and it relates to what you wrote about in your book, quoted on my blog today. I attended an exhibit, lecture and dye ceremony conducted by artist/maker Akihiko Izukura. The ceremony celebrates the life force in the process and product; his practice of zero waste is intrinsic to the making of clothing that embodies aichaku.
Sorry, I was sloppy in the link, and the spelling of simplicity!
Please allow me to complicate this for a moment. If a person feels something but expresses something else, which is the emotion? Is it defined by the person who expresses it or the recipient? Are emotions involuntary? If so, how can they be controlled (as in the military for example)? If not, then why do we allow ourselves unhealthy emotions? Perhaps it takes time to learn the control.
Do you know someone who lives by how they feel? It is healthy or productive? Egotists as well as martyrs suffer.
Perhaps the simplicity is found in the attitudes of the expresser and the receiver. The response to the emotion is as important as the emotion itself (IMHO).
Simplicity is very much communication, which is a very biological phenomenon. Emotions are most often reactions to communication or input. And I find it very interesting that we, as humans, seem to have a biological mechanism by which we react to simpler things more strongly. Hence, more emtion cannot be worse.
After recented escaping from a verbally abusive relationship, where all I felt was numbness and anger, now I feel joy, pain and so many emotions that were being blocked before. More emotion is not necessarily more comfortable, but it is important to feel. Emotions are there to help guide us, protect us.
Yes; more is definitely better. Having had the experience of tightly controlling my feelings in deference to another’s most of my life (I am soon to be 45), I now find that fully expressing my feelings allows for more feelings of expression. Expression is simply being who one is,without regard to fulfilling the complexity of another’s desires, whether perceived or real.
Thank you for sharing your stories Dawn and Joan. We are all the better people for them. Regards, John
i Keep it simple.
questions:
is the quality of emotion important? is there a difference for the reciever, if the emotion is “forced” to it ? What are the consequences?
sometimes i feel run over by a roadtrain of meaningless emotions. thank`s
with the other laws i agree.
i read the book, and liked it.
sorry if these questions were already answerd before, please post a link. thanks!
back in october 2006 lara wrote >> and i am constantly wondering why we do not as a people admit that instinct and intutition are not only vital to our survival but are ‘ usually ‘ correct….
i seem to recall that someone at either mit or harvard did a study some years back upon one of these subjects and made the determination that first impressions are over 90% correct when someone meets another…
Robert, Yes I’ve read that as well. Although I’ve also read that positive face-to-face interviews of prospective employees from a statistical perspective do not work well as a guaranteed indicator that the new hire will be a good fit. At the end of the day however, I am a true believer in intuition. Best wishes, John
Emotion it was blend as together with personas and things, but I tihink is important to make a mention, emotion is not the same that emocionality. Becuase the second one is asociated with unlimited passions.
Emotion is the pure sense that allows us to feel and apreciate the integrality of life, were the outside is percibed friendly and full of sense. At the contrary of racional aproach that moves ustowards a critical process of doubt and partition of the reality. In conlussion and can say that emotions are the fundation of all aprouch. And the only limitation could be the actions that are found only in desire and fear
Emotion it was blend as together with personas and things, but I tihink is important to make a mention, emotion is not the same that emocionality. Becuase the second one is asociated with unlimited passions.
Emotion is the pure sense that allows us to feel and apreciate the integrality of life, were the outside is percibed friendly and full of sense. At the contrary of racional aproach that moves us outwards a critical process of doubt and separation of the reality. In conlusion I can afirm that emotions foundates all kinds of actions and ideas . Neverthless, when emotions are moved only by pleaser and fear, it begins a process of fall of the human nature.
which comes first? emotions or attitude …
I don’t understand how more emotion could be better than less. As a professional horse trainer, I find it is better to have less emotion. Less emotion means having more patience. Less emotion means not losing my temper. Less emotion means not judging what the horse gives me, but accepting what he gives me and building on it. Less emotion means no exasperation or frustration. Less emotion lets me enter a ‘zen’ frame of mind for repeating the drills and training sequences that are needed to help the horse to form the desired habits of response.
I was reared by a parent who had histrionic personality disorder. That was way too much emotion!
Hello Lil, Thanks for your comment. Your experience with horses is fascinating. I think what you are saying is that there is the emotion inside you and the emotions you perceive around you. That this relationship is important to understand and find the right balance for the right time. Regards, John
Happy.
Diane’s earlier question a person feeling something but expressing something else suggest that there is a location for emotions. It would seem to me that the biochemical process that we experience as emotion is local the inside of our heads/bodies while the stimulae that trigger these processes are in the environment all around us. We swim in an ocean of information and our response emanates and echoes all around us affecting others. What we experience is all our own both “good” and “bad” as context would have it.
hi. have any examples been shared that actually illustrate how emotions are simpler? valuable? yes. but simpler? i guess some of you are saying that feeling positive, happy, etc. is simpler (though in some cases i think depression, anger and jealousy can be more simple than feeling positive - especially when something “wrong” has been done to us). also, i think a distinction should be made between emotions and behavior. aren’t emotions what we feel and behavior what we express. also, i think reactions do not exclusively include emotions (a part is behavior (what’s expressed), another emotional (internal) response)
Emotions essentially boil down to pleasure and discomfort, and I believe emotions are actually physical responses which we then try to explain mentally (surge of adrenalin, relaxation response, changes in heartrate, etc.). In my experience, emotions are a physical reaction letting me know whether something is good or bad for me based on my current intentions, goals and beliefs. I may be aware of my deepest intentions or they may be completely unconscious. My beliefs may be self chosen, or they may be culturally conditioned or based on what I was told as a child. And they may be completely erroneous. If I was taught to hate myself, I may feel pleasure while practicing self-destructive behaviors. If I am unconscious of my self hatred, I may be bewildered by what seems to be my irrational behavior. When my conscious beliefs and my deepest intentions collide, what I *think* is good or bad for me may not match my *feelings* of what is good or bad for me, and then my behavior may not match what I *think* and say I feel. That makes life complicated, sometimes even shocking. My emotions (i.e., my physical reactions) are the best way to identify my deepest beliefs and intentions. If I change my intentions and beliefs, my emotional reactions will change as well. So–to me, emotions help me simplify my life tremendously (if I pay attention to them) by bringing unconscious beliefs and intentions into awareness so I can make conscious choices about my behavior. When I am fully aware of my intentions, life becomes very simple–I live with integrity.
I work part-time as a rhapsode, saying other people’s poems out of memory alone (that above is, as you may imagine, my stage name). I work mainly for very reduced audiences, having them at a distance of, say, some five feet: really near. Emotions (and “emotion management”) is a must; actually, is what’s all about. I think that if I followed this rule in my work, people would get bored at the first minutes: their emotional threshold has been overflown. Give people too much emotions in too little time, and they’ll get “emotion-blind”. Build emotions with emotions, like a carefully planned structure of Lego bricks, and everything’ll go fine. (We can love AND hate something at the same time… two simple bricks make up an amazingly different, simple-yet-complex structure). But to me, there’s no use in having more bricks, if you have to plan some added structures just to use those extra bricks. If I want to put just one door in my Lego house, why is it better to have three instead of just the one I need?
To put it simpler: Mankind can get used to anything (so strong is our urge for survival). And if people is used to something in some degree, that something loses power in its effect in inverse ratio. (This goes for emotions, pain, hobbies…). The more (and more intense) emotions you put, the less impact you’ll be likely to have, at least once surpassed that emotional threshold (which is different from individual to individual). Then, everything gets plainly lost.
This can be rephrased as: When’d you shout, sing, and dance happily in the street, like a fool? When you find a dime? Or when you win $1.000.000 in a lottery? Should a coffee pot try to make us feel like if we’ve found the love of our life? It’s just a coffe pot. I think it’s better to have it as that little piece of everyday comfort which adds up to my well-being.
And even if we felt our coffe pot was our sweetheart for some time, once we found our real sweetheart, we’d come back to the coffee pot… and feel deceived. Positive then’d turn to negative, somehow like the children who sees the new toy isn’t like advertised on TV (that emotional effect was so intense, that regulations had to be put to prevent it in some countries!). Besides all that, there’s also the subject of emotional contrast, or dealing with negative and positive, which is also of the greatest importance: in the epics, the hero always begins in a negative and desperate situation, because that will increase the value of his foreseen positive outcome. (And feeling “all negative can be turned for good” is far more positive than, say, “always look at the bright side of life”.)
I tend so to carefully build the emotion level, starting with poems of “low emotional intensity”, then climbing to a climax, then down again (in shorter time than first stage.). If there is any sad poem to be said (talks about death, for instance), let’s say it first than one which is funny; & so on. Then, people can really feel emotions, and the “added time” gives them the chance to also feel they’ve felt something, just like sleep helps our memory fixing things up. That is, people do not also feel something, but afterwards they remember somehow that feeling: and that’s something equally important as feeling itself. (If they didn’t remember they felt something, they would never come back! That’s the diffence between an emotion and an emotional shock.)
I think that a world where everything, from mugs to phones, from cars to lighters, was filled to the brim with emotions (either positive or negative or mix or both), would be pretty stressing, a peace-of-mind killer. Much too big noise-to-signal ratio for my taste.
But, again… I’ve my own, individual, emotional threshold. Maybe I’m just too icky!
Emotions are a huge part of our being, our experiences, and our thoughts, as are the elements of complexity and simplicity. So it is natural that many angles emerge when we are asked to relate emotion and simplicity. Hence we find ourselves with many answers including some which may seem to contradict. From a designers perspective though, we should at least agree that emotions compose a large part of any design that involves people. Wether an artist is preparing a poster of say a horror flick (negative emotions), or a love comedy (positive emotions), if a design is to have impact, that impact is more or less measured in “emotion”. And these woohs and aahs of design are usually what designers are valued for regardless of medium or technical content. Even when the lack of any emotion is the goal of a design, the “ahah” can come when one realizes how the design elegantly achieves its goals. And, the louder the “Ahaa” the better.
My reaction was similar to that of Lil Peck. I agree with pretty much everything on this site except for this exhortation to feel more. My life has become far more simple and pleasant as I’ve trained myself to feel less. In fact, simply focusing on what I feel seems to naturally result in feeling less of whatever it is I’m observing.
hello,John.
i don’t understand the relationship of emotion and simplicity.
In our recent modern society, importance has been placed on the features and functionalities of objects, (the swiss-army knife concept) to do more, faster, and better, till we get things like a device in our hand that can make phone calls, take pictures, exchange text, surf the web, show video, etc. The other school of thought is to instead place importance on the emotion of an object used for a specified purpose. Agreed, the second is more “real” in regards to reaching truer personal fulfillment, but are they both not misplaced focus?
How about a paradigm shift of mindset, instead of evaluating how an object of this world will function for you, or what emotion it will give you, how about evaluating how you can function for that object and how you can give it your emotion. It is a self-centered and egotistical viewpoint that humans build and use the objects and energies of the planet for what they can do for us (in illusion of fulfillment), instead of living as peers among them. The objects we construct, be it a car or computer, and the benefits we gain are very temporary and essentially meaningless in the perspective of the earth.
Tom, the joy you have discovered is not “feeling less emotion”, but instead realizing that you are not your emotions. You’ve recognized that “You” are an independent entity from the emotion, and by observing your emotions as a separate (or even external) entity, their perceived dominance in relation to your “self” is greatly diminished. Being the observer of emotion, you have greater control over it and can appreciate greater meaning. You have found emotion simplicity, and that’s the good kind you want more of; otherwise you’re emotion-void and missing out on the nature of existence.
What happened to less is more.
Why reduction in emotions does not feel as better. Or it does but for fewer?!
@Sergey “less is more” = minimalism. I see it full of emotions although minimal. Super simple.
Hi!!
I’m young-kyung Kim and Korean.
And I’m high schoold student.
I read this book yesterday named The laws of SIMPLICITY.
My English ability is bad. But I’m impressed this book. So I’m write here about my thought.
One of my habit is writing = memo.
So this book has really many letters.
Anyway!
You told me through this book,
about LAW 10.
Reads the book, suddenly I have thought.
—- Until here, you understand.
I think you’re really hard to understand.
because I’m confused…….^^ Sorry~
—–
I hope to talk you about picture.
And I think Picture is good thing explain simplicity.
for example,
Sunny >> simple solar shape..
(I’m sorry this space will not be able to attach the picture.)
In my book has many picture. (You know my habit about momo.)
That is all of it symbolized simplicity.
Anyway…..
until here write the writing.
My thought is really makes laughing.
Because you told me Computer’s garbage can…etc..
All of is based pictre.
OH MY GOD! :>
anyway, i love this book.
And i’m really marvelous about my behavior.
Take care!!!^___^
and I’m always cheering your behavior.
If you “own” your emotional state, then the state of simplicity will arise…
No more complicated than that…
Owning your emotions however is a large undertaking which requires self-control and discipline