Emotional Intelligence

Introduction

Many commentators have noted that we appear to live in an Age of Emotion. How we feel about the world - or how we are seen to feel - seems to matter more than what we do. The rise of ‘virtual signalling’ suggests that much of the grief and anger displayed on social media is as much public performance as genuine emotion. Do we need to return to some old-fashioned values - the stiff upper lip, the use of formality to allow the separation of our public face from our private feelings, and so on? Does this Age of Emotion actually make it harder to deal with real and inevitable emotional events, like death itself? In an age of shallow and superficial online ‘friendships’, have we forgotten how to talk about the really important things?