Original link: Unstable Emotions are Like Bombs - Author: Wang Lu
I'm too lazy to write about all the troubles I've encountered this year, but Teacher Wang still has the energy to write. I believe he has also encountered similar troubles, so I'll leave it here as a memorial.
Original Article:#
In the movie "All In", the young gambler, while watching a football game in a bar, realizes that his bet has won and starts screaming hysterically. I thought to myself, this kind of person, if they were around me, I wouldn't even dare to touch them. And his girlfriend, a pretty and good-natured girl, actually dares to date this guy. Sure enough, after he finished screaming, his girlfriend looked at him silently and finally said that she hadn't actually placed a bet. The gambler, after confirming this, fell into a state of numbness and despair, flipped the table (in a public place), violently pushed his girlfriend to the ground, and then went crazy and hugged her, apologizing.
In reality, there are also people like this - hysterical. When they are happy, they jump around like an indestructible loach; when they are angry, they wish for the destruction of the world. Such people are not suitable for gambling, nor for relationships. Wherever they are, they are like a bomb, and it's also unpredictable. After the bomb explodes once, it won't explode a second time, and it can be reused even after exploding a hundred times.
When I was in middle school, in a class on ethics and morality, there was a homework question: is it good to not show joy or anger? The answer is no, because even if joy or anger is not shown, it still exists, it's just being suppressed, and it doesn't solve the problem. It's not being neither happy nor sad, not being pleased by external things and not being saddened by oneself.
Whenever I hear someone say "not being pleased by external things and not being saddened by oneself", I want to avoid them. I can't stand people pretending. Some things are not originally pretentious, like the saying by Fan Zhongyan, of course I really like it, it's great in Fan Zhongyan's writings, but when modern people bring it up, especially in public places, at the dinner table, or in front of the camera, those who boast about "not being pleased by external things and not being saddened by oneself", make me want to cover my nose.
The answer to that question in the middle school textbook, I think, is also pretentious. If someone can "not show joy or anger", I think they can get along with others. Although in reality, it's not possible to completely not show any emotion. The so-called "not showing joy or anger" is just "not showing joy or anger on a large scale". What does "showing joy or anger on a large scale" mean? Like the gambler in "All In". And "not showing joy or anger on a large scale" is like Gao Qiqiang after he became successful in "Furious Speed". Note that the adjective "after becoming successful" cannot be omitted. - In other words, the proportion of a person showing joy or anger will change before and after they become successful, generally significantly decreasing. - People who study psychology or sociology may want to study this topic: the correlation between the degree to which a person shows joy or anger and their social class, economic status, interpersonal relationships, and level of happiness.
What I want to say is that it's completely impossible to not show joy or anger. A good actor who portrays the anger of a person with status and position often uses subtle movements or microexpressions, such as twitching lips or trembling hands. When cursing someone as a "bastard", we don't capture a person's emotions and level of anger from the three words "bastard", but rather from their speech speed, tone, and body movements. Like Xu Jiang in "Furious Speed", you can tell at a glance that he can't fit into the system, and if he really entered the system, he would be at the top of the department. Because it's difficult for someone with a rank below deputy bureau level to tolerate such rich body language, if they want to hit someone on the head with a golf club and bounce up, they usually have to let the driver do it for them.
Joy and anger will always be shown, it's just that people with poor perception can't see it. "Showing joy or anger" is necessary because we not only convey information through spoken words, but also through things other than text. Therefore, converting videos into images, images into speech, and speech into text will lose a lot of information - but at the same time, text is the most space-saving means of compressing information, it takes up very little space. Therefore, the understanding of the world by large language models mainly comes from reading texts.
We express emotions through things other than language in order to convey information. If joy and anger don't show at all, the function of conveying information will be lost. Under the premise of effectively conveying information, it is better for the degree of emotion showing to be smaller. So, people with poor perception are also called "lacking insight" - the officialdom pays attention to insight, and if a leader's degree of showing emotions is already sufficient, but they haven't captured it, such a person cannot be promoted. Because they force the leader to emit high-power signals every time, which is not energy-efficient and can easily exhaust the leader. Because the leader is emitting signals all day long, the person who needs insight the most is someone who can capture the signals before they are fully emitted or just as they are starting to show, so that the opinions can be perfectly conveyed, which is very energy-efficient.
This is beneficial for health. Because every person is both a transmitter and a receiver of emotional signals. The emotional signals that are emitted are not only received by others, but also by oneself. It's like in a private KTV room, if the amplifier and microphone are close to each other or at the right angle, the sound will be amplified in a loop.
People get angry not to harm their bodies, not for "getting sick from anger with no one to replace", but to make others understand their feelings, know their attitude, and understand their meaning. Anger is a means of communication for everyone.
If when someone says "I am angry", the people around them have already taken it seriously, then their anger can stop there. Because the communication mechanism is smooth. But when they have to throw things to show anger, the act of throwing things will in turn intensify their anger. Saying "I am angry" doesn't mean that a person is very angry, it may even indicate that they can still control their anger at that moment.
The greater the degree to which joy or anger is shown, the more it will intensify. The smaller the degree to which it is shown, the more it helps to contain joy or anger. It's also about the containment of emotions. The containment of emotions is not just the containment of emotions, but also related to the stability of physiological indicators. "Showing" is not limited to facial expressions. If it were limited to facial expressions, people with facial paralysis would be the easiest to not show any emotion; but in reality, the rhythm of breathing is also a form of expression, as well as changes in speech speed. When a person changes the rhythm of their breathing and the speed of their communication, we know that their emotional state has changed.
To truly not show any emotion, it means not showing any change in breathing; when there is no change in breathing, it means not showing any change in heart rate, and the rhythm of the heartbeat will not change; when there is no change in heart rate, it means not showing any change in blood pressure, and therefore not showing any change in adrenaline or dopamine. If it's possible to not show any change in all physiological indicators, then emotions cannot have an impact on health; at this point, even if you change your facial expression, speech speed, body language, and everything else externally, it's not a problem, because your internal physiological indicators are stable, and we call this "manifestation". But in reality, we can't achieve manifestation, because all external manifestations, even if it's the trembling of a hand that others can't perceive, are related to internal physiological indicators.