Today we feel about everything. Any mirror-fogging organism of the feelings-awareness persuasion knows with certainty that feelings must precede and accompany any and all actions, be it brushing your teeth or bombing the enemy. In fact, nowadays, feelings are more important than taking any action at all. This is why we cannot teach children to add and subtract. How a child feels about adding and subtracting is more important than whether he can actually perform the computation. Getting the wrong answer could evoke negative feelings, so the right answer is deliberately diminished and the wrong answer deliberately elevated, till they become mathematically equal in the all-leveling equation of feelings. We feel about so many things these days, and it seems the more feeling we do, the less we actually accomplish. But that's okay, because what's really important, is how we feel about not accomplishing anything. The accomplishment is quite secondary, if not completely superfluous. Some people are so in touch with their feelings that they are paralyzed with indecision at every and any fork in the road of life. If I do this, I can't do that; and if I do that, I can't do this. Oh god, I am filled with such despair, such helplessness, such abandonment, such loneliness, such fear, such confusion, such love, such anger, such guilt, such shame, which leads me right back to despair. And the mystery of these dilemmas can only be unraveled at a hundred bucks an hour.

People who actually do things, and make real decisions in the second-class physical world of solids, liquids, and gasses are considered by people who live in the first-class more real world of feelings to be missing something from their tragic lives of emotional deficit. Because the people who do things do not dwell on their feelings to the point of paralyzing indecision, they can't possibly be feeling anything at all; and unless they are ejaculating in rants of verse for all to share about what it is they are feeling each and every moment of their busy day, they therefore feel nothing, just like the tree that falls in the forest with no one there to hear it.

In our egocentric "me" culture, it seems that people are finding it increasingly difficult to reconcile the fact that the things they "feel" are not universally felt by everyone else. I recently encountered a woman who could not make up her mind whether she wanted to attend an awards dinner in her honor or to go to her group therapy, thus upholding her weekly commitment. This was a terrible dilemma for her, and she was filled with many paralyzing and debilitating feelings, meaningful as they were. In an earnest attempt to zero in on her decision-making thresholds, I asked her if she would attend the awards dinner if it were the Nobel Prize they were giving her, and this enraged her. "You see the world in black and white!" she scathingly diagnosed me as if I had shingles. "No," I replied, "There's black, then gray, then white." She didn't hear me though, because she knew I was hell bent on resolving her "problem" to a binary decision to go or not to go, and this means I see the world in only black and white, while the world for her is resplendent with gray, only gray, and more magnificent shades of ever resolving gray to evoke feelings upon more paralyzing feelings. How beautiful that she can dwell on all this for as long as she does, the psychologically-aware must be thinking. I simply thought she was nuts, and this, of course, was proof that I am an insensitive person, and also proof that I function only on a black and white level of intellect, completely devoid of feelings.

One person's alleged catastrophe may evoke no feelings at all in another person, other than, perhaps, the sense that this person of great feeling is completely out of his mind, followed by the desire to laugh in his overly-sensitive face. This of course, is one of the great sins of our psychologically-conscious modern times, and no doubt, if things continue as they are, there will soon sprout a jungle of state and federal laws to prohibit public, and then private insensitivity as measured and policed by the most super-sensitive amongst us. If you don't share the "feelings" of the most sensitive or even craziest person in a group, the problem lies with you, not them, from their point of view. Then they accuse you of not being in touch with your feelings, and they pity you as they look down upon you from the withering heights of piety, and they are legitimately saddened by this deficit and problem you must learn to overcome. And people don't generally want their problems solved, anyway, just like this woman. They want to revel in their "feelings", remain paralyzed, and talk about it, and "vent". The psychiatrists have these people right where they want them. To even hint that these people are being absurdly self-indulgent makes you insensitive and devoid of feelings because you don't share or adopt their sense of catastrophe and self-indulgence.

Being accused of not being in touch with your feelings is a lot like being told that you have a drinking problem. Even if you don't have a drinking problem, and you are casually accused of having one, you have to simply burp and admit that alas, it is true, and stagger into the nearest detox clinic. If you deny it, you are in denial. You can't win. It is an indictment beyond discussion. The mere utterance makes it true, and if you take the delicious bait, you have lost before you compose the most rational and considered argument. "When did you stop beating your wife, Senator?" is another one. The next day the papers read, "Senator denies beating wife!" You can't win. Now add to the list: "You are not in touch with your feelings." You can't deny it, because anyone not already in a straight jacket can make that claim; and if you deny it, an army of over-therapized sensitive people will nod their heads with a knowing knee-jerk gleam in their eyes, because the more you say, and the more you explain, the more they look down upon you with the saddened pity of all cult members in-the-know. The therapy cult knows that there exists no final level, or even practical level of "in touchness" with your feelings. There are always new levels of feelings to ponder, and it never ends. Every beat of their hearts unlocks volumes of unstated, unresolved, unexplored feelings for them to carefully consider and catalogue in or out of the lotus position, and if those feelings don't exist, they must be invented or worse--falsely implanted in the name of searching for truth.

Descartes said, "I think, therefore I am." Descartes was a mere ape in the evolution of the human conscious, though. If he only had spent enough time on the couch, I'm sure this great philosopher and mathematician would not only have been reduced to a quivering lump of indecision, but would have eventually corrected the error of his ways and said, "I feel, therefore I am."