Wednesday, February 20, 2008

Emotions and Weakness

I was just pondering this in the morning on my way to work. I'm a fairly emotional person. So, I was just wondering if being emotional was a sign of character weakness. The opinions expressed here are obviously biased. So, read on with massive doses of salt.

Having emotions has certainly been bothersome to me. At times, I feel that it's better to have a switch that I could throw to turn them off, especially emotions of anger and sadness. Being a person who works intimately with computers, I can appreciate their clarity of logic and certainty of calculation. I sometimes envy these machines that I work with.

Being an emotional person means that my mood swings fairly regularly. It's like taking a roller coaster ride. I will get depressed at times and be absolutely high with joy at other times. I will also experience anger and frustration fairly often. When I get hit by a bad day, everything just goes off. I cannot concentrate on my work and I cannot do much else except fret. Today was one such day. So, I went into the department to do some brainless work (writing idiot friendly instructions for the 3rd year VLSI project) while I should actually be working on my research project.

But on the other hand, if I was not emotional, I would not have been able to achieve all that I have. I am a very passionate person. I do something because I love to do it not because I have to do it. When I am in love with it, I can be totally driven in my pursuit of it. I need neither food nor rest. At times, even when my brain tells me to give up, my heart tells me to go on, and my heart usually wins. This blind devotion has allowed me to accomplish all that I have. Without emotions, I doubt that I'd be so blindly driven.

So, my conclusion is that emotions are a potential weakness and strength. Then, the question that needs to be asked is whether or not emotions had anything to do with character strength at all. Personally, I don't think that there's causality between the two but each supports the other instead. It is certainly possible to be emotional and strong as well as non-emotional and weak.

But I do think that I should be less emotional, publicly, though sometimes it can get very difficult.

1 comment:

Xuan said...

Being emotional is a character weakness, but the ability to feed emotion as a fuel to pursue an ambition/dream, is a strength.