1. This feeling is excited by the society of others, by the
herd-feeling, and depressed by long-continued solitude or
loneliness. The stimuli that come from other people's faces,
voices, contacts--their emotions, feelings and manifestations of
energy--are those we are best adapted to react to, those most
valuable in stirring us up. Scenery, the grandeur of the outer
world, finally depress the most of us, and we can bear these
things best in company. Who has not, on a long railroad journey,
watched with weariness and flickering interest valley and hill
and meadow swing by and then sat up with energy and definite
attention as a human being passed along on some rural road?
Lacking these stimuli there is monotony and monotony always has
with it as one of its painful features a subjective sense of
lowered energy, of fatigue. This is the problem of the housewife
and the solitary worker everywhere,--there is failure of the
sense of energy due to a failure to receive new stimuli in their
most potent form, our fellows.
2. The disappearance or injury of desire and purpose. Let there
be a sudden blocking of a purpose or an aim, so that it seems
impossible of fulfillment, and energy-feeling drops; movement,
thought, even feeling seem painful. The will flags, and the whole
world becomes unreal. This is part of the anhedonia we spoke of.
In reality, we have the disappearance of hope as basic in this
adynamia. Hope and courage are in part organic, in part are due
to the belief that a desired goal can be reached. Whether that
goal is health, when one is sick, or riches, or fame, or love and
possession, if it is a well-centralized goal toward which our
main energies are bent, and then seems suddenly impossible to
reach, there is a corresponding paralysis of energy.
Here is where a great difference is seen between individuals and
between one time of life and another. There are some to whom hope
is a shining beacon light never absent; whatever happens, hope
remains, like the beautiful fable of Pandora's box. There are
others to whom any obstruction, any discouraging feature, blots
out hope, and who constantly need the energy of others; their
persuasions and exhortations, for a renewal of energy. Here, as
elsewhere in life, some are givers and others takers of energy.
In the presence of the hopeless it is hard to maintain one's own
feeling of energy and that is why the average man shuns them. He
guards as priceless his own enthusiasm.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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