If you could turn off your humanity and emotions, would you?

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If you had asked me this question in my twenties, I would have said that I wanted to master my emotions. I wanted to be the one in control, not the one being controlled. I didn’t realize until my thirties just what a fool’s errand that was.

I find it interesting that the question ties humanity with emotional expression. That was what always struck me when I found out I could turn off emotional expression if I needed to. I felt less, well, human. If someone started talking to me, I didn’t have a frame of reference to respond to them with. I’d have to start faking emotions in order to deal with them.

At one point in my early twenties, like many young men of my day, I discovered Japanese animated movies. I was struck by what I would now call the emotional range that the themes of the shows dealt with. I would spend much of my free time immersed in these stories.

To this day I greatly enjoy the imaginative and emotional depth of Japanese media like The Legend of Zelda. Their sadness reflects the inner sadness one feels when contemplating the sheer utter pointlessness of the world around us.

The hero, Link explores a world shattered by a tremendous evil, the people that managed to survive bear immense pain and sadness. You, as the hero, are charged not just with healing the land, but also, through sometimes seemingly pointless quests, healing the people as well. Just being willing to be there and help, gives them hope.

All young men seem to be bound by their evolutionary heritage to seek out some kind of heroism. We want to help, but the world around us seems so ugly and cold. It’s very tempting to want to replace that ugliness, that coldness, that irrationality, with a comforting blanket of empty rationality. But when it comes to healing, to building a safe home, to actually helping people, you need to be able to empathize with their suffering.

And you can’t do that with cold rationality. The reasons why people feel things the way they do do not matter. The feelings do. If someone is hurting, and all you do is remove the source of the pain, then you’ve left them with pain that doesn’t understand why it’s still there. It will still hurt, years later.

Empathy, humanity, the ability to share and release emotion, to recognize emotion in oneself, so that you can recognize it in others, is a very important part of what makes us human. Sure, at the end of the day you need to get things done. But what’s remembered at the end of the day is not what you’ve done for people, but rather how you made them feel.