Becoming Emodiverse
OK, I presume you are like me and had never heard the term emodiverse. We all understand how important diversity is, right? Well, its not just culture and ecology that require diversity. Our emotions apparently also need a degree of diversity to be the healthiest they can be. The simplest way to think about this is that we need some bad times to fully appreciate the good times. The same is true of our emotions. This discovery came about because I was reading an article on happiness. The optimization of happiness has created the realization that since no one can be so fortunate as to have constantly sustained happiness, the resiliency of our psyche is meaningfully improved by experiencing a full array of negative emotions. We intuitively understand that plants that have learned to deal with hardships in nature are more sustainable and hardy. I tend to buy only drought-resistant plants and that means they know better how to handle things like water deprivation. Our whole existence these days is overwhelmed by thoughts of vaccinations. The first question we ask one another these days is whether we have gotten our double dose vaccinations yet or not. The hardiness of our immune systems is on the front page of every global newspaper. I have many times thanked my mother for dragging my sisters and me through the wilds of Latin America and other places of diminished hygiene so as to build our immunities and make us less vulnerable to every passing bug. That is the whole idea of emodiversity. Make the kids learn about adversity and toughen up through diversity of experiences.
The benefits of this clearly has limits. When I think about our two years living in the little tropical valley in Costa Rica, I think that I learned about the value of reading as a form of entertainment (there was no TV while the U.S. was enjoying the Golden Age of television). To a five-year-old, THAT was a valid form of adversity that made me stronger. On the other hand, the lack of fluoridated water meant that every visit to the dentist was a new lesson in how some adversity can cause permanent damage. I have a mouthful of silver that has since caused me to have regular replacements. Without that vestige of my dental days in the tropics, I would barely have reason to visit the dentist. So, it is safe to say that adversity which is temporary or fleeting can add to the mix, but adversity which causes permanent damage is not necessarily such a long term benefit.
But what sort of adversity of a psychological nature could be so fatal? That is a very hard question to answer and it is fair to say that this is like a very complex and dangerous chemistry experiment. Add this element to a concoction and it strengthens it. Add the same element to another mix and it destroys it. This is a risky business to be sure.
This issue of emodiversity has come up now due to all of the speculation around the world about what lasting impact the COVID Pandemic is having on the mental state of the world’s people. I doubt you would disagree with the notion that people in the more challenged parts of the world or living under difficult circumstances view the Pandemic as just another health risk in a long line of things that can cut short their lives. Weighed against all the risks they must face every day, the net impact on their psychological state might not be so dramatic. If you have spent time traveling to those emerging markets as I have, you would also know that the value of human life (meaning the life of any given person) is not so great. It is those of us who place a high value on life (meaning the life of ANY given person) that tend to be most shaken by the true fragility of life on a planet with 7.8 billion people and trillions on trillions of viruses, bacteria or pathogens of one kind or another that can snatch good health from any of us at a moment’s notice.
I am of mixed mind about what COVID has done to my and my family’s feelings. I know that we have gone over a year without seeing one another (that would be specifically Kim and I and my kids). Of course, we need to leaven that with the realization that as retirees that have moved to warmer climes, we would have seen one another less in any case. Then again, at our age, every opportunity to see one another has more inherent value to us all. We have FaceTime and Zoom after all. If asked, I would say that I am more, not less, connected to my children’s lives than I was when we were in lower Manhattan. That may be a feel-good rationalization, but I honestly believe it to be true. Nevertheless, there is an intangible and somewhat hard to express loss of the physical contact (the hugs) that almost everyone puts at the top of their “things I miss” list these days. The upside for all of us is that we have now been forced to recognize the high value we all really do place on our relationships. It outweighs all else…by a lot. That is a distinct positive that COVID has given to our emotional well-being.
I am reminded of the line by the grandmother in the Steve Martin movie Parenthood. During the worst of moments in Martin’s family life, she tells Martin that when she was a girl she liked the roller coaster ride. She preferred it by saying, “You know, it was just so interesting to me that a ride could make me so frightened, so scared, so sick, so excited, and so thrilled all together! Some didn’t like it. They went on the merry-go-round. That just goes around. Nothing. I like the roller coaster. You get more out of it.” Getting more out of life might be a matter of dealing with the frightening, the scary, and the sickening, just for the benefit of getting more out of it. That may be what emodiversity has to offer.
I have often noted that my liberal tendencies center around the notion that we need to level the economic playing field so that a larger portion of those 7.8 billion feel they have something to lose by being moved to anarchy. To know you have something to lose there are two critically important elements of the equation. You have to actually have something worthy of being concerned about losing. You also need to understand at a visceral level that you are not beyond losing it, no matter who you are. We must all be bound together with one another by the realization that none of us want to lose those things that we value, our families, our livelihood, our lives. Those are the common elements that, when adversity reminds us, we all value the most. We should all be lucky enough to become emodiverse.