Everyone sees what you appear to be, few experience what you really are. (Niccolò Machiavelli)
During the school years, and later at the university, I saw that everyone was afraid of the word “interactive”. This fear is – I tend to believe – typical to my country. An interactive lecture had a negative connotation because you were expecting the teacher to punish you if you were saying something wrong or to ask you to write an essay about a particular thing if you made the mistake to ask for a clarification (of course, the teacher would request the essay without explaining, without answering to your question – a form of cruelty if you ask me, as you learn from a young age to avoid, inhibit yourself, and also tolerate absurdity). For the above reasons, everyone I knew hated interactive lectures and was pleased during those lectures where passivity was encouraged and the teacher or professor talked alone, as if there was nobody in the class (often this was actually the case, as everyone was doing anything but pay attention to the monologue). Then, it was later in life, during my psychotherapy training, that I learned to “tolerate” interactivity (our trainer wasn’t a vicious person and perhaps she was normalizing us). Then, I understood that being interactive was of high value, as I was learning by dialogue, connection, and there was also a lot of creativity involved.
A blog article is, by definition, a monologue. My monologue. You are passively reading me and you are under no obligation to react in any way. There is no exchange and few people dare to reply in comments. And I doubt that I thoroughly cover a subject in such a way so that nothing can be added. In this article I will do something different: I will make it interactive and open ended.
The photo of the article doesn’t exist. It was generated with DeepAI, a random site I found on the internet. I just gave some instructions and the artificial intelligence (AI) has generated this image which is quite close to what I wanted to get. Why I used the AI? Because I can’t draw, I don’t have this talent, but I understood that the AI can be used not only for world domination and the extinction of the human race, but also as a useful tool. So I decided to paint with the AI an emotional state. Your task is to find which one.
You have several options; the image above can be the representation of:
- Fear
- Anger
- Sadness
- Joy
- Calmness
- Indifference
What do you think? What is the emotional state transmitted by this image? What do I feel or felt? What is my mood when I look at this image? Or, the other way around, what is the vibe transmitted by this image? This image is the symbolical representation of what feeling or frame of mind?
The great thing about images is that they represent more than the words can express. For this reason, during my psychotherapy training, our trainer used to ask us to take a piece of paper and draw what we felt, emotions, desires, concepts, etc. Then, we would exchange our (unsigned and anonymous) drawings with the other members of the group and they would write on the other side of that paper what they thought or felt that the image was representing. Through many exercises like this one we’re doing in this article I learned to better speak the language of emotions and also developed quite a lot my eye for symbols hidden in the drawings of other people.
So, you are asked to participate in the comments below! If you are emotionally frozen, now it’s time to get out of the fridge (or freezer)… I challenge you! You can also not only choose one of the 6 options I gave to you above, but also explain what else you see in the image, what you feel… It’s a good exercise and, if we get some feedback on this article, we shall see different opinions and perhaps notice how differently the world looks through the eyes of others. I mean, we are looking at exactly the same image, so if we get different answers for the unique question about the dominant emotion, just imagine how different our perceptions might be and, consequently, how different our realities are.
I will be cross-posting this article between my Vivaldi and Substack blogs, so that you can see the comments in both places. The link is below.
https://cezardanilevici.substack.com/p/can-you-guess-the-emotion