Feeling Doesn't Fit in Words Alone

In 1997, when Pew Research Center telephoned an American household to ask what people thought, about thirty-six in every hundred answered. By 2012, that was nine. By 2018 it was six. Nine people in ten now let it ring.

I want to be careful with that number, because the easy version of the story is wrong. Pew themselves argue that a low response rate does not automatically ruin a survey’s accuracy, and they have done the work to say so. This is not proof that the data has become worthless. It is proof of something more interesting. Somewhere inside those twenty-one years, we stopped being willing to be asked.

Everyone working in culture knows the small domestic version of it. The exit survey nobody fills in. The QR code on the way out of the exhibition that four people scan. The free text box at the bottom of the page, please tell us in a few words what this meant to you, sitting empty, exactly where the one thing you actually wanted to know was supposed to go.

The usual diagnosis is length, and the usual diagnosis is not wrong. SurveyMonkey went through its own platform data and found that people give the first question of a survey about seventy-five seconds of attention. By the third question, around thirty. And on a survey of thirty questions, they give each one roughly nineteen seconds. You can watch the care drain out of a form in real time. Which means a long survey does not simply bore people. It trains them to stop listening to themselves.

It was never only the length

So shorten it. Cut the thirty questions down to five. That solves the smaller problem, and I am all for solving it. The larger problem is the words.

Roughly one in ten people has alexithymia, a real and stable difficulty in identifying and describing their own emotions in words. Not a rarity. Not an illness. The estimates run wider or narrower depending on where you draw the line, but one in ten is the safe figure. These people feel exactly as much as everyone else. They simply cannot get it into a sentence on demand.

And the other nine of us are nowhere near as fluent as we like to believe. Putting a feeling into language means forcing something fast, bodily and whole through the slow gate of vocabulary, and what arrives on the other side is a borrowed label. Moving. Powerful. Interesting. Words we reach for because they are close to hand, not because they are true.

Which is why the question that sounds the most caring, how did you feel about it, is so often the one that gets the least back. It sends a person up into their head to hunt for a word, and the hunt is work, and the work is faintly unpleasant, and most of us politely decline it. Think how often you have sat in a theatre and been taken apart by something in the second act, then walked out into the street and found you could not say why. You knew. You had known since the second act. The knowing was simply not made of sentences.

In the last piece I argued that we are already the instrument, that each of us carries the one reading all those electrodes are reaching for, and that nobody ever thinks to ask. I want to sharpen that. It is not enough to ask. If what we demand back is a sentence, we have only swapped a machine that cannot hear feeling for a form that cannot hear it either.

Nobody needed a sentence

So try the other thing. Stop asking people to talk about their emotions, and let them show one.

They already do, constantly, and in the places where they are allowed to, the numbers stop collapsing. Think of the little box of smiley faces bolted to the wall as you come out of airport security, green through red, one press. The company behind them, HappyOrNot, has put more than thirty thousand of those terminals into a hundred and thirty five countries and logged over two billion presses. Two billion. The famous trial was at Heathrow, before the 2012 Olympics, and the detail I love is that the security staff started smiling more once they could see their own score. It works because it asks for a gesture and not an essay, and because it catches you in the two seconds while the feeling is still there.

This is not a gimmick invented by an airport. Psychologists have been doing it carefully since at least 1994, when Bradley and Lang published the Self-Assessment Manikin, a row of small cartoon figures running from frowning to beaming, from calm to wide awake. You point at the one that looks like you. No vocabulary at all, and it is still one of the most used instruments in emotion research, with a consistency most word-based questionnaires would envy.

And then there is the one I find beautiful. In 2006 Jonathan Harris and Sep Kamvar built We Feel Fine, software that went out across the blogs of the world, harvested every sentence beginning with the words I feel, and turned each one into a single coloured particle drifting across a screen. By 2009 it held more than nine million feelings. You did not read it. You watched it move, like weather. Psychologists have been arranging the emotions as a colour wheel since 1980, so the instinct is an old one. What was new was seeing a whole population’s inner life arrive as colour instead of as paragraphs.

There is an obvious way to get this wrong, and it is already everywhere. You bolt five smiley faces onto the top of the same thirty-question form and call it a redesign. Still long, still extractive, just decorated. The gain was never prettier questions, it was fewer of them.

And there is a second honesty, which matters more. A colour is not a diagnosis. A face you tapped in a corridor is not a named emotion, and anyone reading grief or awe off a single swatch has gone further than the evidence goes. What these things hand you is a direction: warmer, brighter, more alive, or none of the above. A direction is the honest size of the claim, and it is enough. Nobody needs a verdict on their own evening.

Did you feel something?

The door out of this is much smaller than we expect.

Not how did you feel, which pushes a person into their head and returns an empty box. Just: did you feel something. Yes or no. Almost anyone will answer that. Fifteen seconds, in the corridor, while the thing is still warm, answered in the gut where art actually lands and not in the part of the mind that composes explanations. I am not against the intellect, I am against sending it in first, every time, to speak for a feeling it arrived too late to witness.

And what comes back should not be a cold four out of five, because a score drops you straight back into the spreadsheet you were trying to get out of. It should be something you would not mind keeping. Something that blooms.

Nine in ten of us have stopped picking up the phone. I do not read that as apathy, and after this many years of watching people come out of concert halls with their faces changed, I refuse to read it as indifference. We did not stop feeling. We stopped agreeing to explain.

A question, then, to the people who run the museums, the theatres, the operas and the festivals, and to the researchers sitting beside them. Tomorrow morning, which would you rather find on your desk: the number of people who came, or some sense of how many of them left changed? If it is the second, when did you last go looking? I spent years not looking either. I would like to hear from the ones who have.