Winning and Losing Feelings

  I believe (or theorize, anyway) that there is something called 'emotional economy', and it has to do with how emotions are controlled by society to fulfill specific ends by the society itself. An example might be something like jealousy or avarice. In the case of jealousy, a society cannot function when people become so jealous that they plot against others to achieve certain goods or specific ends. On the other hand, a tiny modicum of jealousy might be just the thing that people need to want to consume more and work harder, out of fear that they may not add up to their more 'successful' peers or neighbors. Society in a sense has to foster just the right amount of jealousy: not too much that it would disrupt the harmony of communities by creating unhealthy competition or dominance, and not too little that people would be oblivious to consuming and producing. Thus, the society has a vested interest in sustaining particular narratives of what 'healthy' and 'unhealthy' emotions are. And I would venture that for the most part, we experience emotions not 'purely' as a felt energy, but through the meditation of these filtered meanings or social channels that give the emotion fuel.
   I wonder what life would be like if we simply stopped associating our emotions with these complicated story-lines. An example is the feeling of being rejected. When we are rejected by a place of employment or a friend, our inclination is sometimes to feel that we are unworthy or 'a loser', and this sense of 'being a loser' pervades the feeling of rejection. But does this 'felt sense' have to accompany every emotion of rejection? If I only experience the emotion just as it is without associating or attaching it to a felt meaning around losing/winning, then the emotion has a chance to simmer down; it isn't being stirred up by narratives of gaining and losing. But more so, I can allow the emotion to stay with me more, knowing that it has nothing really to do with the sense of who I am and what my worth is. In fact, I can even simply enjoy the unique energy of just having that emotion without the associated feeling that it should lead to something else, such as a sense of success or winning. And while I believe meditation serves this purpose of disconnecting emotion from wandering thoughts, I also think that abiding in the emotions themselves without attaching special meanings to them, may be a good practice in the everyday life.