Does anyone else here fake happiness and contentment? You see these little humorous posts.. they don't really come from any genuine emotion do they? A lot of this love and friendship is faked too right?
There is a line in a John Steinbeck novel includes a story about a man who lost it all, and something to the effect that he carries on by putting one foot in front of the other. He had nothing to live for, and the act of living was all fake for him, but that is the advise that kept him going.
Dennis Prager says something or other that we don't ever consider offending others around us with our body odor, so neither should we offend them by imposing our bad moods on them. Deodorant is a lot less natural than body stank, but it is something that we put on for others regardless of how unnatural it may be.
The same can be said about a good mood that is as artificial as the Soft and Dri but that otherwise makes our company moderately tolerable.
There is a trick that I read about long ago about walking around with a pencil in your mouth, creating a fake smile. However, just by the purely physical act of smiling, even normally depressed people reported being in a better mood because of that exercise.
Acting civilized may be fake, but it is not only fake. We very much are defined by what we
do much more than we are defined by how we
feel. Our actions define our inner selves much more than our feelings ever will. We can discover what a person actually believes through watching his actions much more than by listening to his professions.
Conversely, passive-aggressive is totally fake because that is like someone smiling at your face, and then stabbing you in the back. But, if someone gives you a smilie, and doesn't simultaneously betray you, even if you intuitively know that that other person must see you as the jerk that you may even know yourself to be, then there is something nevertheless genuine in fake emotion that is put on just to make your day go a little bit better.