Submission #10: What are the advantages and disadvantages of not feeling emotions?

           

Have you ever wanted to feel no emotions? You wouldn’t feel hurt, upset, sadness or anger. But you also wouldn’t feel happiness, joy, love or excitement. People with Alexithymia feel exactly that- nothing. They are not able to describe or identify emotions in themselves. I got interested in this because I saw this article: (http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20150818-what-is-it-like-to-have-never-felt-an-emotion). In the article they introduced “alexes”, or people with Alexithymia. This made me curious and I came up with the question “What are the advantages and disadvantages of not feeling emotions?” I wanted to know how these people felt, I wanted to know if they wanted to be able to feel feelings or if they didn’t want to feel emotions and were happy the way they were. Now, I cannot say for certain what it feel like to not feel. But I can try my best to weigh the advantages and disadvantages.

            To start with the advantages, you wouldn’t feel any emotion that would depress your mood. You wouldn’t feel shame, guilt, anger, sadness etc. You could go on living your life without feeling bad about what you are doing, you wouldn’t feel guilt so you could rob a bank and not feel bad. Basically, you would not be able to sympathize with others. This could be good in the sense that you would be immune to any hate, like bullying. But this could also be bad because our ability to feel emotions and feel for others is what makes us human; it gives us the ability to be compassionate.

            Now, the disadvantages of not feeling emotions. What about the happy things? What about the things that make you feel so much joy when you think about them? If we lost the ability to feel emotions (or never had them to begin with) we wouldn’t be able to feel joy, happiness, love, excitement, surprise etc. all the things that make us smile. Arguably, if laughing were an emotion, you wouldn’t be able to laugh. If you couldn’t feel, does that mean you couldn’t fall in love? Does that mean love is considered and emotion? If you couldn’t feel, that means you wouldn’t enjoy anything, because if you did, then that means that thing made you happy; but if you couldn’t identify that feeling of happiness, then that could mean that you never had or felt it.

            Emotions are very transparent, the lines are blurred when it comes to what is considered an emotion and what is not. Like I said before you could consider laughter as an emotion but someone else might not. This confuses the category if what it’s like to not feel emotions. It’s very tricky to describe and categorize emotions because everybody has their own opinion on what is an emotion and what is not. But what I think we can all agree on is that emotions help us understand ourselves and others better because a person’s emotions can act as a guide to try to identify how someone is feeling on the inside.