Welcome back to “Serve & Survey.” This week’s question came from a movie night watching Disney’s “Inside Out 2.” In the movie, a group of animated emotions fight for control, but, in the end, they learn that they are all needed to make Riley who she is. That made me wonder: What would happen if we didn’t let all of them stay? People always say emotions make us human, but we all connect to some feelings more than others. So, if we had to get rid of one, which emotion would be the easiest to cut? I took this exact question to campus.
There are six commonly-recognized, universal emotions: joy, sadness, fear, anger, disgust and surprise. If you could permanently remove one human emotion from existence, which would you choose?
Once again making my way around Fresh at Carmichael Dining Center and Dewick-MacPhie Dining Center this week, I asked this question to 76 students. Of those 76, eight students (10.5%) chose sadness, four students (5.3%) chose fear, eight students (10.5%) chose anger, 48 students (63.2%) chose disgust, seven students (9.2%) chose surprise and only one student (1.3%) chose to eliminate joy. In a clear landslide, nearly two-thirds of the polled students decided that if one emotion had to go, it would be disgust.
When I asked students why they didn’t cut sadness, fear or anger, the responses were surprisingly very thought-out. One student simply said, “If you were to take away sadness, you wouldn’t understand joy as much.” While one may expect people to quickly hop on the bandwagon of getting rid of such emotions, the poll results suggest that, as a society, we’re willing to experience the pain and suffering that cause distress if it means we get to feel joy. Sadness and anger are recognized and accepted as a part of being human, so we cherish such ‘useful’ emotions, even if they are painful. Sadness indicates loss and attachment while anger indicates injustice, but even so, people seem averse to cutting them out because they are actively making an impact.
Fear also made it through the chopping block, as only four students decided to cut it. In terms of survival, fear is necessary for processing dangerous situations or even weighing out the nerves leading up to an event. You may not enjoy the slight increase in your heartbeat when the Canadian geese get a little too close and a little too loud with their honking, but you probably appreciate your brain’s ability to keep you alert.
If the point was just to be comfortable, sadness or fear would have topped the list. But they didn’t.
So why disgust?
The most recurring answer among students is that it just doesn’t feel like it accomplishes anything besides discomfort. As one student put it: “I don’t like feeling disgusted, it’s just gross…”
No, my lovely readers, there is no deeper meaning behind that. It’s just gross.
People don’t understand the point of disgust because it doesn’t seem like it leads to a reward in the way sadness does with joy; instead, it makes us dismissive. Where other emotions might pull us in or pull us toward one another, disgust pushes things away. Where sadness might help us build a connection and anger might help us create change, disgust only gives rise to rejection. It’s pushing away a plate of unappetizing food (ironic for the lunchtime surveys) or gagging at the smell of something rotten. But disgust doesn’t only push away food or smells, it can push away people, too.
Another student brought in the perspective: “There’s always a root of judgement in disgust.” Disgust can be attached to people or differences we don’t understand. While you need anger and sadness to understand joy, and you need fear to survive, disgust for one person will only create a lot more ugly in the world.
We are known to be different and imperfect in every step of our lives, so it is nice to see that we can accept this and embrace it by eliminating disgust rather than trying to evade hardships altogether.
Only one student chose to eliminate joy. Statistically, that makes 1.3% of this campus boldly pessimistic. To whoever you are, this column sees you and respects your attempt at sticking to the bit and being different. But, in all seriousness, the fact that joy was nearly untouchable shows that humanity understands the full value in joy and what it takes to preserve it. Choosing to keep it means accepting the full range of emotions that make it meaningful. Seventy-five out of 76 students were willing to keep the highs, even if it meant keeping the lows, too.
So what does this week’s survey say about us? It shows that students don’t want to erase the hard parts of being human. The only emotion that felt easy to cut was the one that seems to push people away rather than bringing them together. In the end, almost everyone chose to keep the full range of feelings, even the difficult ones. And just as the beautiful writing in “Inside Out 2” predicted, all of our emotions need to have turns at our control panels, because all of them play a role in making us who we are.
This was this week’s survey. You’ve officially been served. Until next time on “Serve & Survey.”
