People

Why Are People More Emotional When They Are Young?

Is this true? I think so, given my observations.

Maybe I could've said more irrational, but I figure that's probably almost the same thing as emotional. Young people tend to feel things more intensely and passionately, and this is contrary to reason or rationalism, which is also presumably why more crimes are committed by the young.

The heart and body are stronger, perhaps the mind more alive, the ego wants to place itself at the center of the universe, but an indifferent reality has the last word (it seems, in fact, to make the ego irrelevant and almost comical).

Years of suffering necessitate caution and self-restraint. Most learn and adapt to this but some retain that childish complacency in the face of an uncaring reality.

You could extend this into religion and say that the need for a god is the need for a protective authority figure or that the afterlife is a way to escape the suffering of life for a paradise where all one's needs are met.

But the price of life is life. All adults know this.

So which comes first... feelings or intellect?

If one is practicing caution and self-restraint isn't one acting against ones own nature?

I don't see the distinction. Feelings are bodily sensations eventuated by appropriate conceptualizations or sensations, selected for through generations to encourage certain behaviour's advantageous to propagation of the species. They act as a guide to action, a link to our genetic past, a signpost telling us what was successful for our ancestors.

I am not particularily keen to posit a distinct dispassionate intellect which is ruled, or even just prodded by, emotions. I mean, how much of the drive to thought could be described as the very same sort of instinct as emotion? The will to thought? The will to truth?

My point was that as one matures one becomes more guarded and restrained, more controlled, as a response to suffering, as a response to emotion itself and the huge affect it has on the one experiencing it. Not a denial of emotion, but an increased awareness of it's possible dangers.

Why? Lack of experience of the world. It's why you could not "vote" unless you had property and the experience of the hardships of war and love; the appropriate age to have learnt these things, required in more luminescent times.

You see, the whole point of youth is(was) the opportunity to make mistakes.. and more importantly, to learn from them.