Emotions can be hard to express no matter who you are. Before I wrote this, I believed that a couple of generations before me were taught not to express emotions and to keep it all to yourself. To be emotionless. Of course, being a person who is going to therapy and regularly expresses their emotions every week, I thought this is the most stupid thing I had heard.
In order to cope with life, you need to be able to express your emotions and how you’re feeling.
Then I started researching my claim. I thought it would be easy to find articles expressing my opinion. The first article is called No Feelings: Why This Generation Has So Much Trouble Being Vulnerable. I clicked on it immediately and expected a confirmation. What I got instead was completely different.
Instead, the article focused on my generation and how we have a hard time feeling vulnerable and expressing our feelings. This is surprising to me. I thought the generations before me were having a hard time expressing emotion but here was my generation doing the exact same!
For example, baby boomers didn’t talk about mental health. They were taught that anxiety and depression were signs of weakness. Anything else that was mental including PTSD and dementia was not discussed.
For my generation, generation y and generation z, we tend to be more open about mental health but we still tend to hide any emotion that allows us to be vulnerable. Between hiding behind our screens and using those screens to keep busy, we don’t make time to feel our feelings.
So what do we learn from these ’emotionless generations’?.
The first thing we can learn is that each generation has a problem. I think that sometimes it is easier to blame a past generation instead of owning our own problems. Yes, generations before have problems with accepting that problems exist but we also refuse to believe that our feelings exist.
The second thing we can learn is that while we are making progress we still have a long way to go. We don’t only have to deal with stigmas of mental health but we also have to deal with the rise of technology. Technology has made it harder for us to just have ‘downtime’. I know that I am guilty of doing this myself. When I get home and all I want to do is zone out with Netflix. I have to remember that sitting with my own thoughts is healthy too.
The last thing that we can learn is that we aren’t perfect. While it is extremely hard to express our emotions and be vulnerable, it is important not only to our mental health but also to the relationships we have with others. The more we can express what we feel, the more we can help each other.
What can we learn from emotionless generations? We can learn that we have each generation has a set of problems, that it’ll take time to work those problems out, and reminding ourselves that we are not perfect in our efforts. Emotions will always be important to our society. Working hard to be able to express our emotions is the right thing.
