Have you ever experienced a truly marvelous moment in your life and found that your own reaction was not what you had expected? Did you not smile as much as expected when you got you first salary? Did your fiance not cry while saying that life-altering "yes" to you? Did your eyes not tear up when you saw your baby for the first time on the sonograph? And there would be a million other events, though not as significant, where you might have found yourself lacking in emotions.
The cyclic downfall hypothesis
Though you might feel a tinge (or more) of guilt for this, you can find solace in the fact that you are not alone. The reason that we, as a society, consistently fail to meet emotional outbursts and reactions is something that warrants a bit of attention. One of the plausible, yet horrifying, reasons could be that we are producing emotionally moribund pyschopaths by the dozen, leading to a reduction in the overall emotional quotient of the society. It implies that individuals are losing their "emotionality" if you will, due to the way our lives and social interactions are structured. As a people, we are slowing regressing into the nuclear family hunter-gatherer phase prevalent before community living became a thing and farming started in the days of our Neanderthal-esque forefathers. If that is true, it does present a very strong argument in favour of the cyclic nature of civilization - how things usually come full circle, how civilizations rise and subsequently fall, how societies flourish and then die off, how communities prosper and then fade into oblivion. In the mindless race for better futures, lesser dependencies, more independence and simpler lives, the connections we sever may not seem costly, yet they do cost us in terms of soul nourishment and social interactivity. There is a profound loneliness that is evident in most of the people of the younger generations especially in larger cities, where people tend to live away from their families. Loneliness is a precursor to a host of mental health issues, and could possibly impact the way we respond to emotions and react in times of emotionally charged situations. That can explain our under performance on emotional big stages.
The media-dosed baseline hypothesis
The second possible reason that we feel inadequate emotionally is that our reactivity baseline is probably not correct. Most of us experience life-changing moments, well, only a few times in our lives. We don't get first salaries every day, or fall in love frequently (except some lucky people do). How do we know, then, what is the appropriate reaction to these events? As human beings, we have the power to learn from others. That forms the baseline of comparison we create consciously and unconsciously. The older generations formed this baseline looking at the community around them. However, our generation has grown up in an age of excessive media exposure. We had access to media content from across the world during our formative years and we have seen some great performers react to similar life events on screen. That, consciously or unconsciously, becomes a part of our training model for appropriate reactions, which is unfortunate because the actors who we see on screen are paid to react excessively, their bodily and facial expressions, tonality, and every other verbal and nonverbal cue, is exaggerated to ensure their reactions are not subtle. They work hard to make sure that what they are expressing is communicated across media without even an iota of doubt. There is always an element of extraneous effort in reactions when we look at "good" actors - that extra flair of expressions is what makes them good. Though a boon for actors, it creates a false baseline for people in the real world. We start expecting ourselves to react overly to similar situations drawing from our media content viewership experiences, and then feel emotionally short when we do not match up to what we have seen so many times before. As regular humans, we all have different emotional ranges and expressive capabilities, which might not match up to the extraneous baseline established in our minds except for the few who are truly extra expressive. This is starkly in contrast to previous generations, where this baseline was more realistic due to the sample set being the community around, whose range of expressions was of the same magnitude even if not similar. We can probably blame our type 1 brain for this, which introduces biases in our routine thought processes, creating learning models and retrieving information subconsciously without our type 2 brain even being aware of it.
It is okay to be subtle
Though we cannot truly establish which of these is truly the reason for what happens to us, we can say with certainty that it is probably okay to be subtle about the way we feel. The shouting from the rooftops, the boombox driven confessions of love, the passionate bouts of love conjured up at the slightest hints of attraction, the profuse ophthalmic waterworks on every sentimental moment...it might not be your thing and that is absolutely okay. Establish your own baseline of emotional expression and surely there will be people who would appreciate you for being real about it rather than overly dramatic and fake. That is what is essential for a meaningful relationship after all - the honesty of it.
