The Desensitisation of Emotion: Relearning the Language of Feeling
Jun 25, 2025
In a world increasingly shaped by screens, scripts, and superficial connection, something subtle yet profound is slipping through our fingers: our ability to truly feel — and to truly recognise feeling in others.
There was a time when emotion was visceral. When eye contact, a change in tone, or a shift in body language could speak volumes — before a single word was spoken. But in today’s digital landscape, where texting is king and emojis do the heavy lifting of emotional nuance, we’re losing touch with the felt sense of things. We’re being conditioned not to feel — or worse, to distrust what we feel.
A Culture Shock of Emotion
Imagine a man rings your business. He’s urgent, firm, maybe even agitated. To the desensitised ear, he sounds furious — dangerous, even. But in reality, he’s simply impassioned. Perhaps upset, but not aggressive. The reaction? Panic. Alarm. An instinctive need to label and suppress.
Why? Because many of us — particularly in younger generations — have grown up in a world where true emotional expression has been sanitised, filtered, and edited into oblivion. We experience emotion largely through curated online personas or dramatised performances in film and TV. And in those worlds, emotion is either hyper-exaggerated or totally absent.
So when raw, real feeling enters the room — in all its unfiltered energy — it’s overwhelming. Unreadable. Even threatening.
Emotional Nutrition and the Chicken Nugget Analogy
Children once knew where food came from. Then, over time, that knowledge was stripped away. Now, show a child a chicken and then tell them it becomes a nugget, and you’re met with horror. Because we’ve hidden the truth of the process. We’ve made it palatable — but in doing so, we’ve also made it alien.
It’s no different with emotion. We’ve been served processed versions of feeling for so long that we no longer recognise the real thing. We confuse passion with aggression. Forthrightness with danger. We call for order when what’s really needed is understanding.
The Crisis of Connection
At its core, this is a crisis of connection. We’ve lost our emotional fluency. When we are faced with genuine emotional presence — whether it's sadness, anger, joy, or frustration — we don’t know how to respond. Our energetic and nervous systems aren’t attuned to handle it. It’s like being hit with a foreign language we once knew but haven’t spoken in years.
What we call hypersensitivity is often just unfamiliarity. Like trying to listen to a thunderstorm after a lifetime of white noise.
Acting, Entertainment & The Emotional Illusion
Modern entertainment doesn’t just reflect culture — it shapes it. Films, television, and social media offer simulated emotions performed by professionals. Actors rehearse and refine feelings until they’re glossy and digestible. But these aren’t raw expressions. They’re manufactured affect. Polished echoes of truth.
This constant consumption of simulated emotion makes us subconsciously compare real emotional encounters to their fictional counterparts. We start believing that emotion should look like it does on Netflix: tidy, beautiful, and resolved within thirty minutes.
So when someone shows up in real life with messy, unfiltered feeling — we flinch. We misread. We retreat.
Relearning the Real
To reclaim our emotional literacy, we must relearn the language of feeling. That means:
Spending time in real, embodied conversation — face to face, eye to eye.
Allowing emotion to exist without trying to fix, judge, or silence it.
Recognising that emotion is information, not threat.
Teaching the next generation not just how to manage their feelings, but how to recognise and honour them in others.
Emotion is not the enemy. It’s the compass. It points to our boundaries, our needs, our truth. And when we desensitise ourselves to it, we lose our way.
A Call Back to Feeling
We are not robots. We are not actors on a soundstage. We are human beings — messy, miraculous, and deeply feeling creatures. The more we embrace that, the more resilient, empathetic, and connected we become.
It’s time we remembered what emotion really is: not something to be filtered out, but something to be felt — deeply, honestly, and together.
Let’s relearn how to feel. Not through screens, but through presence. Not through emojis, but through empathy.
Because healing starts where feeling is allowed to live.
In a world increasingly shaped by screens, scripts, and superficial connection, something subtle yet profound is slipping through our fingers: our ability to truly feel — and to truly recognise feeling in others.
There was a time when emotion was visceral. When eye contact, a change in tone, or a shift in body language could speak volumes — before a single word was spoken. But in today’s digital landscape, where texting is king and emojis do the heavy lifting of emotional nuance, we’re losing touch with the felt sense of things. We’re being conditioned not to feel — or worse, to distrust what we feel.
A Culture Shock of Emotion
Imagine a man rings your business. He’s urgent, firm, maybe even agitated. To the desensitised ear, he sounds furious — dangerous, even. But in reality, he’s simply impassioned. Perhaps upset, but not aggressive. The reaction? Panic. Alarm. An instinctive need to label and suppress.
Why? Because many of us — particularly in younger generations — have grown up in a world where true emotional expression has been sanitised, filtered, and edited into oblivion. We experience emotion largely through curated online personas or dramatised performances in film and TV. And in those worlds, emotion is either hyper-exaggerated or totally absent.
So when raw, real feeling enters the room — in all its unfiltered energy — it’s overwhelming. Unreadable. Even threatening.
Emotional Nutrition and the Chicken Nugget Analogy
Children once knew where food came from. Then, over time, that knowledge was stripped away. Now, show a child a chicken and then tell them it becomes a nugget, and you’re met with horror. Because we’ve hidden the truth of the process. We’ve made it palatable — but in doing so, we’ve also made it alien.
It’s no different with emotion. We’ve been served processed versions of feeling for so long that we no longer recognise the real thing. We confuse passion with aggression. Forthrightness with danger. We call for order when what’s really needed is understanding.
The Crisis of Connection
At its core, this is a crisis of connection. We’ve lost our emotional fluency. When we are faced with genuine emotional presence — whether it's sadness, anger, joy, or frustration — we don’t know how to respond. Our energetic and nervous systems aren’t attuned to handle it. It’s like being hit with a foreign language we once knew but haven’t spoken in years.
What we call hypersensitivity is often just unfamiliarity. Like trying to listen to a thunderstorm after a lifetime of white noise.
Acting, Entertainment & The Emotional Illusion
Modern entertainment doesn’t just reflect culture — it shapes it. Films, television, and social media offer simulated emotions performed by professionals. Actors rehearse and refine feelings until they’re glossy and digestible. But these aren’t raw expressions. They’re manufactured affect. Polished echoes of truth.
This constant consumption of simulated emotion makes us subconsciously compare real emotional encounters to their fictional counterparts. We start believing that emotion should look like it does on Netflix: tidy, beautiful, and resolved within thirty minutes.
So when someone shows up in real life with messy, unfiltered feeling — we flinch. We misread. We retreat.
Relearning the Real
To reclaim our emotional literacy, we must relearn the language of feeling. That means:
Spending time in real, embodied conversation — face to face, eye to eye.
Allowing emotion to exist without trying to fix, judge, or silence it.
Recognising that emotion is information, not threat.
Teaching the next generation not just how to manage their feelings, but how to recognise and honour them in others.
Emotion is not the enemy. It’s the compass. It points to our boundaries, our needs, our truth. And when we desensitise ourselves to it, we lose our way.
A Call Back to Feeling
We are not robots. We are not actors on a soundstage. We are human beings — messy, miraculous, and deeply feeling creatures. The more we embrace that, the more resilient, empathetic, and connected we become.
It’s time we remembered what emotion really is: not something to be filtered out, but something to be felt — deeply, honestly, and together.
Let’s relearn how to feel. Not through screens, but through presence. Not through emojis, but through empathy.
Because healing starts where feeling is allowed to live.
In a world increasingly shaped by screens, scripts, and superficial connection, something subtle yet profound is slipping through our fingers: our ability to truly feel — and to truly recognise feeling in others.
There was a time when emotion was visceral. When eye contact, a change in tone, or a shift in body language could speak volumes — before a single word was spoken. But in today’s digital landscape, where texting is king and emojis do the heavy lifting of emotional nuance, we’re losing touch with the felt sense of things. We’re being conditioned not to feel — or worse, to distrust what we feel.
A Culture Shock of Emotion
Imagine a man rings your business. He’s urgent, firm, maybe even agitated. To the desensitised ear, he sounds furious — dangerous, even. But in reality, he’s simply impassioned. Perhaps upset, but not aggressive. The reaction? Panic. Alarm. An instinctive need to label and suppress.
Why? Because many of us — particularly in younger generations — have grown up in a world where true emotional expression has been sanitised, filtered, and edited into oblivion. We experience emotion largely through curated online personas or dramatised performances in film and TV. And in those worlds, emotion is either hyper-exaggerated or totally absent.
So when raw, real feeling enters the room — in all its unfiltered energy — it’s overwhelming. Unreadable. Even threatening.
Emotional Nutrition and the Chicken Nugget Analogy
Children once knew where food came from. Then, over time, that knowledge was stripped away. Now, show a child a chicken and then tell them it becomes a nugget, and you’re met with horror. Because we’ve hidden the truth of the process. We’ve made it palatable — but in doing so, we’ve also made it alien.
It’s no different with emotion. We’ve been served processed versions of feeling for so long that we no longer recognise the real thing. We confuse passion with aggression. Forthrightness with danger. We call for order when what’s really needed is understanding.
The Crisis of Connection
At its core, this is a crisis of connection. We’ve lost our emotional fluency. When we are faced with genuine emotional presence — whether it's sadness, anger, joy, or frustration — we don’t know how to respond. Our energetic and nervous systems aren’t attuned to handle it. It’s like being hit with a foreign language we once knew but haven’t spoken in years.
What we call hypersensitivity is often just unfamiliarity. Like trying to listen to a thunderstorm after a lifetime of white noise.
Acting, Entertainment & The Emotional Illusion
Modern entertainment doesn’t just reflect culture — it shapes it. Films, television, and social media offer simulated emotions performed by professionals. Actors rehearse and refine feelings until they’re glossy and digestible. But these aren’t raw expressions. They’re manufactured affect. Polished echoes of truth.
This constant consumption of simulated emotion makes us subconsciously compare real emotional encounters to their fictional counterparts. We start believing that emotion should look like it does on Netflix: tidy, beautiful, and resolved within thirty minutes.
So when someone shows up in real life with messy, unfiltered feeling — we flinch. We misread. We retreat.
Relearning the Real
To reclaim our emotional literacy, we must relearn the language of feeling. That means:
Spending time in real, embodied conversation — face to face, eye to eye.
Allowing emotion to exist without trying to fix, judge, or silence it.
Recognising that emotion is information, not threat.
Teaching the next generation not just how to manage their feelings, but how to recognise and honour them in others.
Emotion is not the enemy. It’s the compass. It points to our boundaries, our needs, our truth. And when we desensitise ourselves to it, we lose our way.
A Call Back to Feeling
We are not robots. We are not actors on a soundstage. We are human beings — messy, miraculous, and deeply feeling creatures. The more we embrace that, the more resilient, empathetic, and connected we become.
It’s time we remembered what emotion really is: not something to be filtered out, but something to be felt — deeply, honestly, and together.
Let’s relearn how to feel. Not through screens, but through presence. Not through emojis, but through empathy.
Because healing starts where feeling is allowed to live.
