Rationalizing Emotion
- mashatchesnokova
- May 27
- 2 min read
I remember in elementary school when they taught us about anger issues. Or anger control. They played a video, and I wonder if I would easily be able to find it if I looked for it. The video was of a boy and something made them mad. It was a song too of course. But instead of staying mad and doing something stupid and angry the boy decides to wait it off and he starts to feel better. I guess time and space healed him. And probably also that someone was singing a song to him to "be cool" or something.
Though the video was silly, and I thought so at the time, I was also fascinated by the effect and the lesson. So...just some time. And maybe some space. And you feel all better! It's like magic; you don't actually have to do anything. It's not like some recipe where you have to create something as a remedy.
And now that I'm thinking about it, it's almost as if all he had do was just...rationalize his emotions. I wonder if that's what everyone has to do. Do we actually stop being mad about something, with time and space, as the boy did, or do we think to ourselves, "this is stupid. And I can't be mad all this time. I have to get over it." Because those are all also equally valid reasons that work for stopping.
And maybe also in order to stop being mad, even though we don't feel like we have to do anything, but that time heals, we actually have to put work in. Even if it's subconsciously. And maybe that work is making peace with whatever it is. Even if it's just "this is stupid. Whatever" or if it's "Well it happened. Can't be mad about this forever. Must get over this."
Thus far, this blog post has only been concerned with one emotion: anger. However before I thought of this blog topic, I was already very familiar with rationalizing different types of emotion. Like happiness or contentedness. I will link the blog posts related to this below. As well as "Winter break crashout of '25" you can read a real-life example of me rationalizing anger.
It is often heard, humans are different from animals because they have emotions. But what if emotions are not all that they have. What if what sets them apart is a whole other level. Rationalizing emotions.
Seems ironic. Rationalizing...logic...emotions? But maybe it's sometimes what we have to do to get over our emotions. Even when emotional, we can see the impairment. Like we're machines, and we know we can function better. Think about all the times we see and look down upon how "silly" or "dramatic" someone can be.
If humans were just emotional, would they really be any better than animals? Subject to the world of all our instincts, and not being able to do anything about it. Not having the capacity to stop, or do anything but. So maybe it's not emotions that set us apart, but ration. Animals are just emotional. Like Freud's "id."
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