Young Writers Society

“Do you know what pathetic means?”

Sure, it means weak and pitiful, why do you ask?

“Nope, well not originally, but today’s meanings are corrupted by yesterday’s fancy. Originally it’s meaning is tied to “emotional”.”

Well that makes sense; people who are too emotional generally lack the strength to keep their emotions in check.

“When did this happen? When did emotions become something to keep bottled up?”

It doesn’t matter when, and you’re only asking to question the validity of the thought. I’ll skip your question and give you the answer you’re looking for; its validity is solid, and held as such by most people. Origin doesn’t really matter.

“That’s pretty blunt. So we should discount everything to do with a subject in terms of validity except for the value it is currently held in? We should ignore future benefits and past nostalgia and objective truth?”

I’m not getting pulled into the epistemology argument again; truth can wait for another day. You seem quite shocked by my ‘blunt idea’, but there’s a rather entrenched support for the subject: modernism.

“Modernism? Stop changing the subject, we were talking about emotions!”

Very well, I’m sure the bottling up of emotions. comes from the vulnerability people feel when they open up to others, and the pain that people feel when they’re betrayed.

“But surely that situation has always been there, why would there be a shift towards emotionality being vilified?”

Probably the rise of teen culture. I hate to sound like a broken record, but Emos have a lot to answer for.

“How so? Surely Emos would seek to have emotionality ingrained as a virtue, since they’re the ones aiming for a monopoly in that particular area.”

Yes, but their emotional expression is mimesis, an imitation of the real. They cheapen real emotion. And it’s not just with the black-clad guyliner wearing depressed teen. It seems that all of a sudden high-schoolers are desperate for their problems to be so much bigger than everyone else’s, so insurmountable that when their little psyches do buckle under the pressure, all they are punished with is sympathy.

“Wow, so you really think this has led to a change in how people see emotion as a whole?”

Makes sense, doesn’t it? It’s surprising, but when you look at history, most reactionary cultural movements backfire. Look at feminists for instance.

“Aren’t feminists doing a pretty good job on their front, they’ve undermined a lot of the social stigma, won their suffrage and are accepted in the workplace a lot more than they were even 30 years ago.”

Yes, but in many cases they’re expected to fulfil the jobs of a career woman and a domestic retainer. Until men are ready to step up at home, women are trapped in limbo between two worlds. Worse than that, they’ve burnt their bridges by attaching so much stigma to the role of house-wife.

“Damn, they must be angry about that. But going back to emotions/Emos, where does this leave everyone not trapped in that self-obsessive expression of manufactured emotions?”

Well by now you’ve probably gathered that Emos, and teens in general for that matter, and the used car-salesmen of emotion. We vintage dealers have been all but driven out of business

shakes fist at teen society