Dear rdgrad15,

Thanks for raising this topic. I think it is an important one. Hopefully many people will see it and respond with their own personal experiences and opinions.

Looking back over my life, I think I have been someone who has experienced both of the things you mentioned, being someone who has shown emotions to others and someone who has reacted negatively when others have expressed emotions in front of me.

The human mind is very mysterious and it is difficult to understand why it does what it does in us. The fact that we are such unique individuals in so many ways seems to increase this difficulty. Mapping the various patterns in such a complex thing, maybe the most complex in the world, is an ongoing process.

Sometimes it seems that people in each age can tend to think of their time as close to the end of things in the sense that science has mapped out all the important features and that later generations are just going to fill in some of the little details. It could be that we are really at the beginning of things when it comes to the social sciences and that really big revolutionary insights are still far away in the future. Of course this could be wrong too.

In any case, I think there are "reasons" why people are more comfortable or less comfortable with the expression of emotions in themselves and others. I don't think [and again I could be wrong] that this is a dichotomous matter. I think comfort and tolerance and appreciation and their opposites when it comes to the expression of emotions constitute a range or continuum where people have various degrees of comfort and discomfort about this and also that this might change with what is going on in a person's life at the surface or more deeply.

I know people who seem to have different tolerance levels for my expressions of emotion. And it sometimes inhibits me. I think there is perhaps some truth in the idea that childhood experiences have some relation to all this as well as genetics and so on. I was in a McDonald's restaurant one day and a parent was scolding his son. His son began to cry. The father said: "Don't you dare cry. Don't be a baby." Perhaps some people have been deeply conditioned to a kind of stoic pattern of seeing things and reacting to things? And such people can regard the open expression of emotion as a sign or weakness or danger. I think there are cultural differences too.

Tolerance does not seem to me to be something that is in great supply in human beings. Virtue requires effort. I realize this is probably a gross oversimplification of what is deep and rich and complex. I think there are not only degrees of truth but probably degrees of error too. This is something discussed by modern logicians. To say that human beings have two fingers on each hand is an error, but it is a "greater" error to say that human beings have 400 fingers on each hand. Not sure this discussion in pure logic has filtered down to the social sciences yet, at least as far as I can see.

Of course I am conscious that I could be wrong about all of this. I think it was Aristotle who described an opinion as one half of a contradiction that a person holds while having some doubt about whether the other half of the contradiction might be true . . . or something to that effect.

I am sorry if people do not appreciate and treasure you for your uniqueness. It sometimes seems that for many people, their default attitude is "could be better, but isn't better" and few people have a default attitude of "could be worse, but isn't worse, thank goodness." Appreciation, gratitude and feeling lucky or blessed do not seem to be most people's default attitude.

I hope you and all of us meet people and have friendships that are more tolerant of our uniqueness. I wish you only the very best!

Sincerely yours, Yao Wen