Emotions Aren’t Real
There’s this moment every morning—right after your alarm detonates and right before your soul clocks back into your skeleton—where you lie there blinking, staring at the ceiling, and experiencing what experts call “feelings.” Anxiety, dread, longing, joy, confusion, the existential whiplash of remembering you still exist. A whole buffet of internal weather.
But here’s the twist:
None of it is real.
Not the dread. Not the joy. Not the anxiety. Not whatever that feeling is when you’re out of groceries but too ashamed to DoorDash a single banana. Those sensations, those “emotions,” are as artificial as language, day shifts, and people who post motivational quotes on LinkedIn.
You think you’re sad? Cute. You think you’re furious? Precious. According to decades of psychological research, what you’re really doing is pattern-matching nonsense electrical storms into little labeled boxes because your brain is basically running 1998 Windows software and refuses to update.
Welcome to the emotional Matrix. Let’s take the red pill.
THE LIE OF THE “THING” YOU THINK YOU FEEL
Humans didn’t invent emotions on purpose. We didn’t sit around a fire and say, “Alright, Kevin, what should we call the weird face you make when your goat dies? How about ‘grief’?” No. We stumbled into emotions the same way raccoons stumble into trash—accidentally, chaotically, and with far too much enthusiasm.
Most people think emotions are universal, biological, cosmic, encoded in the sacred DNA scrolls. But cognitive scientist Lisa Feldman Barrett torched that illusion like a marshmallow too close to the flame. According to her research (which is annoyingly well-sourced and scientifically bulletproof), emotions aren’t things—they’re constructed interpretations your brain makes using memory, context, and whatever leftover nonsense it finds on the floor of your psyche.
Your brain doesn’t feel despair.
It guesses despair.
Your brain doesn’t experience joy.
It estimates joy, like a contractor eyeballing a broken porch.
You are basically hallucinating meaning into bodily sensations 24/7. A tight chest? That’s anxiety. Or heartbreak. Or indigestion. Or maybe you're dying. Your brain picks one, rolls with it, and then forces you to live inside that narrative like a bad Airbnb.
THE EMOTIONAL INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX
If emotions aren’t real, then the entire multi-billion-dollar therapy-self-help-meditation-essential-oil-guided-journaling complex is built on vapor.
Think about it:
“Identify your emotions.”
How? They’re imaginary.“Name your feelings.”
Why? They don’t actually exist.“Sit with your sadness.”
Sit where? It’s not furniture.
We’ve all been conned into believing emotions are stable entities floating around like Pokémon waiting to be caught. Big Therapy, Big Pharma, Big TED Talk—all of them sell this narrative that emotions are forces of nature, tied to trauma, ancestors, chakras, astrology, or your inner child who somehow has more control over your life than you do.
And like George Carlin would remind you:
Anything that can be bottled, branded, monetized, or turned into a $2,000 weekend retreat probably isn’t real.
If sadness were real, corporations wouldn’t be able to turn it into lavender candles.
THE CAVEMEN WEREN’T “DEPRESSED”
You think a caveman ever sat on a rock, chin in hands, sighing deeply, announcing to the tribe, “Guys… I think I’m experiencing a depressive episode”?
No.
He either had:
Hunger
Injury
A bear problem
Or someone stole his fire rock
There wasn’t a nuanced inner world. No rumination. No mood journaling. No serotonin charts printed in a prehistoric PowerPoint.
People today are drowning in emotions because we over-named the human experience. We turned basic survival signals into a Disney World of internal melodrama.
Cavemen weren’t anxious; they were alert.
Cavemen weren’t heartbroken; they were lonely and horny and surrounded by relatives.
Cavemen didn’t have emotional baggage; they had actual, physical mammoths trying to kill them.
“BUT I FEEL THINGS!” — DO YOU, THOUGH?
“But my emotions feel real,” you say, clutching your chest like a Victorian widow fainting on a velvet lounge.
Sure. And your dreams feel real. And your Instagram feed feels real. And when you’re half-awake at 2 a.m. and think your hoodie is a demon crouched in the corner—that feels real too.
Feeling something doesn’t make it real.
Ask any neuroscientist tracing the spaghetti mess of electrical activity in your brain. According to Joseph LeDoux, a top emotion researcher, emotions are basically “survival circuits”—internal warning systems that we retroactively decorate with meaning.
Your “anger” is a nervous system misinterpreting arousal.
Your “love” is a chemical cocktail your species manufactured to trick you into not wandering off alone to die.
Your “sadness” is your body going, “Something’s wrong. Fix it.” But modern life gives you nothing to fix—so you’re left staring out a window listening to moody Spotify playlists like you’re in a French film.
The whole thing is performance art your brain forces you to attend.
THE FEAR FACTORY BETWEEN YOUR EARS
Here’s the fun part:
Most emotions you experience don’t even come from the present moment. They come from:
Old memories
Childhood nonsense
Random smells
Failed relationships
Tweets you shouldn’t have read
The slow psychological collapse we call adulthood
According to neuroscience research from Antonio Damasio—a guy who basically spent his whole career poking the biology of consciousness with a stick—your body reacts first, then your brain invents a story to explain the reaction.
You feel a jolt.
Your brain panics.
It points at something—anything—and declares:
“That caused it! That’s fear! That’s anxiety!”
Your brain is not a wise sage.
It is a confused employee doing its best with broken equipment.
THE MYTH OF EMOTIONAL HONESTY
We love the idea of “being honest about our feelings.”
It sounds noble. Authentic. Spiritually gluten-free.
But if emotions are constructed hallucinations, then “being honest about your feelings” is just “accurately reporting your delusions.”
It’s like proudly saying, “My imaginary friend Todd thinks you’re toxic.”
Your emotional reactions aren’t windows into truth. They’re weather patterns. Temporary, dramatic, meaningless.
You can feel betrayed without being betrayed.
You can feel insecure without being flawed.
You can feel in love without actually liking the person.
(That one explains so much of modern dating it should be carved into a wall somewhere.)
Emotional honesty isn’t enlightenment.
It’s just you narrating whatever chemical hallucination is currently screaming the loudest.
EMOTIONS AS SOCIAL TRAFFIC SIGNALS
Psychologist Paul Ekman famously mapped “universal facial expressions,” arguing that emotions are hardwired into the human species.
But even Ekman later admitted the universality claim was oversold. Cultures differ drastically in how they interpret, express, suppress, or manufacture emotional behavior.
Translation:
Emotions are social behavior, not internal truth.
You’re not “feeling angry.”
You’re participating in the global performance art piece called "being a person.”
You’re signaling.
Broadcasting.
Replicating.
Smiling when you don’t mean it.
Crying because crying is what people do in movies.
Acting “happy” in group photos like joy is a mandatory dress code.
We’re all pretending.
Some people just commit harder than others.
THE PERSONALITY PROBLEM
You ever notice how people treat emotions like they’re collectible figurines?
“I’m anxious.”
“I’m angry.”
“I’m a sensitive person.”
“I’m passionate.”
“I’m dead inside.”
(That one might actually be true.)
We don’t just have emotions—we identify with them, like they’re pets, hobbies, star signs, or subscription services. But personality psychologists like Walter Mischel (the marshmallow test guy) showed that personality traits—and the emotional patterns tied to them—are shockingly unstable.
You're not consistently emotional.
You’re situationally emotional.
You’re “calm” until someone cuts you off in traffic.
You’re “empathetic” until you’re hungry.
You’re “patient” until your phone dies at 3%.
You are not your emotions.
Your emotions are just glitchy software running on top of your biological hardware.
THE GREAT REVEAL: EMOTIONS ARE STORIES
Here’s the big reveal, the meta-twist, the part Chuck Palahniuk would write in jagged sentences:
Emotions are stories.
Your brain is the unreliable narrator.
And you keep believing every chapter.
Every emotion is a narrative your mind improvises to explain sensations it doesn’t understand. That’s it. That’s the whole show. You’re not feeling “rage”—you’re interpreting elevated heart rate and warm blood flow as “rage” because you’ve seen other people do it.
You’re not feeling “love”—you’re interpreting dopamine, oxytocin, serotonin, and sexual hopefulness as something poetic instead of the biological manipulation it is.
Your emotions aren’t real. But your interpretations of them ruin your life anyway.
BUT IF EMOTIONS AREN’T REAL… WHAT DO WE DO?
Simple.
Stop worshiping them.
Stop letting temporary internal hallucinations dictate major life choices. Stop believing every chemical fart that bubbles up from your nervous system. Stop treating your emotional life like it’s the gospel truth written in flaming runes.
Instead:
Treat emotions like weather.
Observe them, ignore them, wait them out.
Don’t build a religion around them.
Don’t confuse them with reality.
Don’t let them drive, vote, text your ex, or buy things on Amazon.
Feelings come and go.
Reality stays.
(Unfortunately.)
You’re not supposed to eliminate emotions.
You’re supposed to stop treating them like divine messages from the universe.
You don’t need emotional healing.
You need emotional demotion.
THE IRONIC TRUTH
Here’s the final paradox:
Emotions aren’t real…but the consequences are.
People go to war over feelings.
People marry because of feelings.
People break up because of feelings.
People spend thousands on therapy, tattoos, retreats, crystals, or self-help books because of feelings.
The hallucinations rule us.
But now you know the trick:
Emotions are just the special effects. The plot is up to you.
Or, in the words of Barrett, Damasio, LeDoux, and the other brain whisperers:
Your experience is constructed.
Which means you can construct something else.
And that, my friend, is the one emotion worth believing in:
freedom.