After reading up on Wikipedia articles for emotions, meta-emotions, moods, and lists of emotions, as well as a few excerpts from Robert E. Thayer’s books, I’m a little overwhelmed with the number of different, yet slightly overlapping, theories of emotions that there are out there.

For a given emotion, here are a few of the dimensions that they have been found to exist upon:

• unpleasant to pleasant
• high energy to low energy
• occupied to unoccupied
• weak to intense
• fleeting to enduring
• non-cognitive to cognitive
• calm to tense

And then, there also seem to be a few ways to rate emotions as being between two other emotions.  For example, some simple emotions:

• joy to sadness
• acceptance to disgust
• fear to anger
• surprise to anticipation

And some more complex emotions, that are actually combinations of the simpler emotions:

• optimism to disappointment (anticipation + joy)
• love to remorse (joy + acceptance)
• submission to contempt (acceptance + fear)
• awe to aggressiveness (fear + surprise)

I’m compiling a list of emotions that’s already several thousand words long, and trying to test out some of these categorizations to see how they fit.  So far there seems to be a lot of square pegs in circle holes.

Hungry

Hunger could be considered an unpleasant, non-cognitive, tense emotion that almost doesn’t exist along any other emotion scales (maybe anticipation if I had to pick one), and can vary in intensity, duration, and level of mental occupation required.  It’s basically an emotion with a physical connection to your body’s survival, but the feeling can be extremely intense and cause all kinds of emotional turmoil in certain situation.  It can lead to anger, impatience, and sometimes even fear.  Is it a true emotion?  For the purposes of this experiment, I will have to say yes, because people will answer “I am feeling hungry” when asked how they are feeling.

Bored

Is boredom a feeling?  One could say it’s unpleasant, fairly low energy, and fairly tense.  If it weren’t tense or unpleasant, you could call it relaxed.  But it’s not.  It’s a state of anticipation again, but a very cognitive anticipation rather than the non-cognitive anticipation of hunger.

Busy

Is feeling busy a feeling?  I would say that it’s an unpleasant feeling of high energy, a high state of occupation, fairly intense, and also fairly tense.  If it exist along the emotional spectrums at all, it probably exists somewhere around aggressiveness, with little time to sit back and exhibit awe or appreciation for what’s around.

Lonely

What is loneliness?  An unpleasant feeling of low energy and mild to high intensity.  It occupies the mind fairly strongly, is highly cognitive, and tense.  Is it a variation of sadness or acceptance?  Is it disappointment or remorse?  Lonliness is a pretty complex emotion and for that reason is pretty difficult to break down into static components.

So, it seems like these emotions can be analyzed and taken apart to a certain extent.  And then, at a certain level of resolution, they become un-pin-pointable, with options to branch off in several different directions.

I have a feeling that I’ll understand this a lot better the more emotions I attempt to dissect.  Will it lead to a clearer understanding of their components or a more confused understanding?  That’s yet to be seen!

Some people make a distinction between feelings, moods, and mindsets, basically drawing the line between them based on their duration. A feeling is what you get when someone gives you the bird. A mood is what happens when everything around you starts to look drab, dull, slightly offensive. And a mindset is something that persists as we weave in and out of feelings and moods, a foundation that either continually brings us up, or takes us down, and often determines how we heal and grow over time.

I’m interested in all three, as I don’t necessarily think that they can be separated. Talking about a feeling separate from its larger context of mood is like trying to figure out how a tomato in a grocery store got so ripe, and the rest of the plant is completely ignored.

As I’ve been thinking about moods for years, I’ve tried many different ways of tracking my moods, and have eventually ended up at the conclusion that there’s no point in recording this stuff unless I’m learning something about myself in the process. There is still a lot of debate about moods. Can you have more than one mood at a time? Can moods be reduced to more basic components? Does saying you are a 5 of 10 on the happy scale actually mean anything? What is there to be learned from tracking moods over time? Are we even objective enough about our own moods to know what we’re feeling with any accuracy at all?

What field do moods lie in? What dimensions can we drape over moods and mark on a grid where they are? Can you ever compare one mood to another, and say that one is more energetic than the other, or that one is more fleeting than the other? Who has a copy of the dictionary that dissects and compares every mood to the others and knows how you feel and can tell you its Mood Identification Number?

I’ve been in my little office for a couple weeks now and am loving it. I’ve been working on Locavore, the photobooth, and another new iPhone app. I’ve been drawing pictures.

I’ve also got a little table with notecards: one notecard for each business idea that I am currently pondering. The freedom I have at this moment with what to build, how to build it, in which order, etc, is incredible. But it also requires serious thinking. So I sit on my couch (given to me generously by a friend) and move the note cards around, and think about how they link together, how they express what I’m trying to express with this business, and how the contribute to the world.

I’ve started spending more time on the couch this week and less time at the desk. I’m reading Small Giants, a wonderful gift from the Small & Special conference I attended last week.

I realize that this little company is a meaning-making machine. It is a vehicle for expressing ideas, and building them in a sustainable manner. The first chapter of Small Giants is about the freedom for a business to choose what it is. What does it want? Does it want to be rich? Does it want to be really big? Does it want to change the world? Or does it want to be great? Or does it want to bring out the best in its people? Or does it want something else?

How do these decisions get made? Who makes them? How do they get set in stone? How do they come to life?

The beginning of a company is a flexible time. The soul hasn’t yet set in the body. Like a comfortable chair, it has to be used in order to find its true personality. And with all of the volatility, there’s a chance that negative qualities can infuse themselves in the business. Perhaps the fear of failure puts claw marks in the couch. Perhaps the fear of not being good enough wears down the arm rest. Or can insecurity and fear be used to motivate and inspire? To push me to make the purest and most real decisions. This is my chance to make the right decisions and to build the right thing, and I fully intend on sitting in that couch as much as is necessary to get it right.

This seemed like an appropriate excerpt for 4th of July. Sorta.

Marathe had settled back on his bottom in the chair. ‘Your U.S.A. word for fanatic, “fanatic,” do they teach you it comes from the Latin for “temple”? It is meaning, literally, “worshipper at the temple.”‘

‘Oh Jesus now here we go again,’ Steeply said.

‘As, if you will give the permission, does this love you speak of, M. Tine’s grand love. It means only the attachment. Tine is attached, fanatically. Our attachments are our temple, what we worship, no? What we give ourselves to, what we invest with faith.’

Steeply made motions of weary familiarity. ‘Herrrrrre we go.’

Marathe ignored this. ‘Are we not all of us fanatics? I say only what you of the U.S.A. only pretend you do not know. Attachments are of great seriousness. Choose your attachments carefully. Choose your temple of fanaticism with great care. What you wish to sing of as tragic love is an attachment not carefully chosen. Die for one person? This is craziness. Persons change, leave, die, become ill. They leave, lie, go mad, have sickness, betray you, die. Your nation outlives you. A cause outlives you.’

‘How are your wife and kids doing, up there, by the way?’

‘You of U.S.A.’s do not seem to believe you may each choose what to die for. Love of a woman, the sexual, it bends back in on the self, makes you narrow, maybe crazy. Choose with care. Love of your nation, your country and people, it enlarges the heart. Something bigger than the self.’

Steeply laid a hand between his misdirected breasts: ‘Ohh . . . Canada. . . . ‘

Marathe leaned again forward on his stumps. ‘Make amusement all you wish. But choose with care. You are what you love. No? You are, completely and only, what you would die for without, as you say, the thinking twice. You, M. Hugh Steeply: you would die without thinking for what?’

Marathe said, ‘This, is it not the choice of the most supreme importance? Who teaches your U.S.A. children how to choose their temple? What to love enough not to think two times?’

Steeply’s face had assumed the openly twisted sneering expression which he knew well Quebecers found repellent on Americans. ‘But you assume it’s always choice, conscious, decision. This isn’t just a little naive, Remy? You sit down with your little accountant’s ledger and soberly decide what to love? Always?’

‘The alternatives are –’

‘What if sometimes there is no choice about what to love? What if the temple comes to Mohammed? What if you just love? without deciding? You just do: you see her and in that instant are lost to sober account-keeping and cannot choose but to love?’

Page 106-108.

Happy independence day!

As you may know, I’ve been trying to frugalify my life in order to extend the amount of time my little company can survive on its own. My wife and I have made a bit of a game of it, trying to find ways to spend less and yet keep the standard of living at the same level. I’m a big fan of constraints when it applies to building websites and software, and it has been a pretty natural transition to also apply constraints to our spending and consumption.

I got this data from Mint, which is an amazing site, but I wish they had more flexible ways of comparing spending by month with multiple categories instead of just one at a time.

April had a couple big one-time payments related to debt from McLeod Residence, so is a little bit inflated.

In June, we tried to eat out a lot less often than in May, but our total food and dining expenses only came down by 26%, which is a bit surprising. We didn’t make any trips that saved us quite a bit of money. Entertainment expenses were cut by 79% (though we did still find ourselves highly entertained during the month… camping trips, boat rides, etc helped a lot). Spending to get my new office set up might have been a little high this month, plus I got the new iPhone. So… overall, still some big areas that can see improvement.

Overall, spending was cut by 39% in June compared to May. We’ll continue to frugalify our lives and see if we can bring July in at about 45-50% of May’s spending.

Money and spending is a really difficult thing to control so far. So many habits are tied with spending, and it’s difficult to make changes that touch on root aspects of my personality. But, one month at a time.

To celebrate the kickoff of a couple new features in Locavore, I promised to draw pictures for people who added something to the new “I Ate Local” tab in Locavore.

Here are a few more people who’ve added something:

Here’s the full set of pictures…