The Rise of Emotional Divestment
The Rise of Emotional Divestment
Why backing away from expressions of sadness, pain, and joy is bad for us, personally and collectively.
Tango Lives (1977) by Dorothea Tanning
I wrote a New York Times essay on the value of tearjerkers — Hollywood movies designed to make you cry — that publishes this morning. This essay picks up where that one leaves off, exploring widespread, insidious shifts in how we experience each other face to face, not just in our most intimate relationships but also in our communities and public spaces. As always, if you want to support my work, consider becoming a paid subscriber. now
Something radical has changed in the wake of the pandemic, and I’d argue that it’s accelerated in the past two years. The focus on facing dark realities through deep connection that blossomed briefly during Covid has been replaced by a divestment not just from communal experiences of sadness but from all external emotional sources. The outrage and confrontation online that peaked before the pandemic began curdled into remote mocking and disgust until both were supplanted, finally, by apathy and distance.
This state of affairs goes beyond compassion fatigue. Our around-the-clock overexposure to global human suffering, our daily feed of what we once considered catastrophic events — political, ecological, cultural — when combined with diminished attention spans, smaller and smaller chunks of content, and baked-in cross-platform imperatives to remain emotionally removed from any given person, place, or event, adds up to a kind of merciless sterility and an impatience with meatspace that we’ve never known before. Instead of slow, steady, face-to-face interactions with other humans, most of us are interrupted by phone alarms and alerts and besieged by rapid video-based media feeds, shorter blocks of text, shorter songs, movies that feel like a frenetic action-based montages, news analyses focused on headlines alone, TikTok summaries of current events (and celebrity beefs and skin products) replacing newspapers, Instagram posts replacing love letters, podcasts replacing books, mood boards replacing hobbies, zooms replacing meet ups, texts replacing phone calls, articles about ten signs of a narcissist replacing therapy, life hacks replacing feelings, ghosting replacing break ups.
These phenomena aren’t matters of indifference or bad taste. This is what arises from our increasingly unnatural experience of community, of culture, of public life, of identity, of bodies in space.
And when each new calamity unfolds — disaster strikes, tempers boil over, frustration explodes into violence — instead of hearing steady, principled adults greet those strong emotions fearlessly in public with direct talk of communicating openly, committing to clear ideals, and supporting differences of opinion as a means of steering through conflict and crisis and dark times, we are treated instead to the personal calculus of divestment: public figures resigning, backing away, announcing that, essentially, engagement isn’t worth it. Rather than highlighting how to navigate the awkwardness and tension of heated differences, media coverage focuses on whether or not a public figure messed up, whether or not they’ll resign, what the blowback will be to the institution at large. Instead of underscoring which principles and boundaries might guide the public conversation forward, online analysis fixates on what each player did wrong — not in terms of honoring their ideals or serving the public, but in terms of their strategy, their publicity efforts, their carefully-worded statements. Every story has a moral that’s never about morals at all. Our morality itself has been supplanted by the morality of maneuvering and messaging, of popularity, power, and influence — which is also, not coincidentally, the morality of emotional divestment.
It makes simple sense, then, that no earnest effort by any individual to address the global despair they see on their phones around the clock is interpreted as springing from deeply-felt emotions. We all watch video clips of young people kidnapped or gunned down, we all witness children crying in the rubble of their former cities, we all navigate the prejudice, hatred, alienation, and rage of strangers, yet when individuals react with fear and anger and sadness, when they place their bodies in the streets to demand the return of hostages or in communal spaces to demand a ceasefire, when they tell us either that the bombings have caused them anguish or that the student encampments create terror inside them or both, their emotions aren’t encountered with respect and compassion. Even daring to state that these sticky traps we’ve laid for ourselves can be mercifully and thoughtfully navigated by sensitive adults focused on open communication and community opens the speaker to a barrage of predictable labels. Empathy itself is interpreted as a bad strategy, a faulty publicity effort, a poorly-worded statement, a misstep, a failure. “This is where it all went wrong,” we’re told. “This is where she said too much.”
Saying anything is saying too much now. Language that’s specific enough to have meaning and emotional weight will be found inadequate or faulty on one of an infinite number of criteria, ushering forth from an encyclopedia of bad choices that are constantly identified, tagged, and tracked by internet culture, political figures, the media, influencers, the pundit class, commenters, trolls, and your 10-year-old daughter. Under these conditions, in which strategy is constantly privileged over passionate feelings and deeply felt principles are constantly misread as strategy, emotional divestment from public life becomes not just tempting but unavoidable.
And what is our message to those few who cling to their passionate feelings, and dare to share them in public? We instruct them to divest. Transfer from that school, it’s not safe. Leave the camp, it’s too dangerous. Quit that job, give up on changing anything, don’t talk in public, don’t speak up. The answer is always to back up, to move away, to feel less, to care less.
“I don’t give af” is the most common shared moral of the moment for a reason. This is the state many aspire to feverishly now, and who can blame them? In a world where peace isn’t accessible without passivity and silence, everyone craves the resources and the money to be as outspoken, reckless, beyond reproach, and destructive as the richest humans on earth, to remain above and beyond community, to transcend the toils of human emotion, to reap what you can as strategically and indifferently as you can, then blast off on your private rocket ship pointed at a distant planet.
Considering these factors, it’s not hard to see why most people aren’t enthusiastic about going to a communal space to watch slow, sad stories about human pain and suffering. These days, we digest sadness alone with our phones. This is so thoroughly the case that sometimes even speaking out loud to your spouse or your mother or your close friend about a recent disaster or tragedy can feel like doubling down. They probably already know about it, so why endure the awkwardness and despair of feeling it together? And if they don’t know about it already, you envy them and want to protect their blissful ignorance for as long as possible.
The negative side effects from this new way of living are too countless to list. We don’t have the patience for anything, let alone the slow unfolding of human emotion. Ask anyone on a dating app how that looks up close, how it plays out over time. Pundits lament that the global populace is enduring a plague of psychobabble that adds up to elaborate justifications for selfishness and immorality, yet the frenetic online labeling and counseling and soothsaying is an effect, not a cause. We are witnessing humans trying to cope, in real time, with the fact that everyone is backing away from each other. The world is populated by emotional Bartlebys: We all prefer not to. No one wants to bother with the slow stuff, the messy stuff. Most of us are out of the habit of facing conflict in person. No one wants to take the risk of caring deeply.
And when others do care, and they show that they care by putting their bodies somewhere we can’t ignore them? Someone calls the cops so they don’t have to confront them themselves, and then that someone retires early and the cops tell us that the job isn’t worth doing anymore and the protesters aren’t being encouraged to negotiate or communicate because the adults in charge are modeling suppression, silence, withdrawal, and divestment.
So even though I wrote that we should bring back the tearjerker, it could be argued that having the courage to put your body somewhere awkward and feel things there maybe be too much to ask of anyone at this unnerving time.
Nevertheless, we need to keep showing our vulnerable hearts to each other. The stakes are enormous. We need more chances to connect and bond with each other in public. We need reminders that total control and complete divestment from others isn’t possible and it certainly isn’t desirable. We need to learn how to forgive each other and reassure each other that we are all sensitive beings, always at risk of intense feelings that we don’t always know how to navigate.
Those intense feelings are why we take care of each other and stand up for what’s right. Those feelings drive us to put the needs of others before our own needs. And those feelings force us to articulate our principles and values in public and also to voice them to each other privately. If we want young people to understand the importance of emotions — the richness and depth and texture that strong feelings add to our daily experience, the exquisite beauty and delight offered by connecting deeply with the present moment, with nature, with ourselves, with each other — then we have to model ways of accepting differences and remaining engaged through the most heated conflicts. Learning to greet strong emotions in ourselves and others with curiosity and compassion is an important first step.
Embracing and celebrating human emotions transcends the personal, in other words. We don’t just work on ourselves in order to become happier and more fully alive. Locating our strength and resilience through emotional reckoning makes our communities more open, more communicative, and more resilient. Every time you dare to address your own shame, navigate a sticky conflict, or pursue true intimacy in the face of countless inconveniences and setbacks, you’re also committing to modeling courage and forgiveness. Your bravery in the face of fear and shame improves the world around you. Believe it.
But make no mistake, remaining engaged with this world requires real courage. Facing your emotions and the emotions of others is frightening, and it’s a practice that’s not supported by our culture at this moment in history. But when you dare to confront the full force of your sadness, despair, shame, and anger, you’re not only clearing the way to feel the full force of your joy, you’re also learning new ways of spreading that joy to others.
We are here to connect deeply, and to feel everything together. Trusting that, believing in it, and spreading love and compassion: That’s our solemn duty, today and every day.
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Heather, you really missed the mark with this part:
...and the protesters tell us not that they’re learning to negotiate, to communicate, to feel more alive, to dare to dream bigger, but they are learning to hate.
If you'd bothered to look at the context of why they are happening, you'd realize the protests are an antidote to emotional divestment. They are an outpouring of communal grief over the endless barrage of dead children and grieving mothers that we're told to look away from. We're told to keep buying stuff, to detach from for the comfort of those who built this empire off the backs of those they perceive as lesser beings.
I wrote my undergraduate thesis on Antigone + the necessity of tragedy, and this is such a good reminder for why collective grieving is so essential to human experience. Thanks for writing this!