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I love HN...I've been waiting for this topic :-D I'm a man who has focused on and has been building tools to get better at expressing my emotions since 2012, i
by jimkleiber 7y ago
I love HN...I've been waiting for this topic :-D
I'm a man who has focused on and has been building tools to get better at expressing my emotions since 2012, including an app called iFeelio, in which I answered the question "how do I feel" over 4,000 times across 4 years and a class called Emotional Self-Defense, which I've run in the US, Europe, and Africa. I have realized and re-realized many things along the way.
One thing I've seen is that each culture seems to have rules about which emotions one is allowed to express and not allowed to express, based on the specific contexts. We often say that men aren't allowed to express our emotions, but I don't think that's the case. We men (in the US) are often allowed to express anger, confidence, feelings of triumph, horniness (maybe), calmness, and maybe even excitement. We're often not allowed to express tenderness, sadness, confusion, uncertainty, fury, etc. And funny enough, when watching our favorite sports team, we're pretty much allowed to express all of the emotions above and more. On the other hand, in the workplace, we're not allowed to really express much at all.
Women may have a different list, as well as people from the Midwest or California, those born in the 60s, digital natives, engineers, or really any different culture or sub-culture.
That being said, I'm glad to see programs like MKP and Evryman providing the place, and moreover, the permission, to express all of the emotions. (Save a Warrior is one I recommend for military vets—I was a witness on one of the programs and it really helped to open my heart and the hearts of the other guys.)
I'd love to chat with anyone on here about this, either in the comments or on Twitter, Telegram, keybase, or whatever people on HN use these days. Check my HN profile for those usernames.
- themodelplumber 7y agoThanks for your comment, it's cool of you to share your journey with us. Unfortunately iFeelio on Android doesn't seem to work well anymore, if at all... :-( Edit: Moodflow seems like it could be good so I'll try that. Just in case this helps others.
- jimkleiber 7y agoYeah, ironically using the app, I realized that coding made me quite frustrated and then my hard drive failed in 2015 or something and I lost the most current version of the apps on both Android and iOS :-/ That being said, I have been thinking about how to get it fixed and even develop v2.0, possibly through open-sourcing it. Do you think you or someone else you know might be interested in that? In the meantime, the magic sauce is really nothing too complicated...I used a note app on Android before developing iFeelio and it worked pretty good. I would open up the note pad, type down the date, time, 1-3 comma-separated words for emotion, and then 1-2 short sentences about how I was feeling. Similar to an I-statement from NVC. An example would be: 2019-09-28...01:09...grateful, tired...just checked HN and saw that a few people replied to my comments, and it's also 1am so maybe I should go to bed soon. I made the app mostly because I wanted to enter the date/time automatically, password protect it, and create some ways for me to sort/filter/search previous entries.
- sqldba 7y agoI don't think it's going to become viral but I'd wager to say it could be useful for some. I want to track my emotions, too, to see if there's any patterns.
- friendlybus 7y agoYou'll have to keep running it over the next 4-8 years to filter out the short term cultural changes. The expression of sadness will likely ramp up from it's locked up baseline now to 2024.
- jimkleiber 7y agoI'm a little confused...what do you mean that the expression of sadness will ramp up?
- friendlybus 7y agoIt's an art thing. Hard to compress into a short comment. As the Trump capture on sadness fades there will be a natural reversal into an excess of the expression of sadness. We are seeing the start of it in films where there are women crying. Not that Trump controls that stuff, but rather he is tapping into a deeper principle. The cult like approach to certainty we see on the web will fade over time as well. Expressions of uncertainty will become more acceptable.
- fapjacks 7y agoCan you please decompress your short comment into a fuller one? I am interested in your thesis, but I still do not understand.
- Infinitesimus 7y agoTo echo my sibling comment, I'd love to read a lengthier explanation of this idea. Perhaps a blog or some resources could be handy as well
- dromen 7y agoYou're throwing swines to the pearls, it doesn't work that way either.