Emotions on scale

Sheila was broken-hearted. On Wednesday her boyfriend had left her for another girl. She spent two days crying with her face in her pillow. Partly because of this, she did a bad job interview on Friday and missed out on the career she’d set her heart on. Sheila was down. By Saturday, she found herself thinking she could never feel worse.

One week later, Sheila's father died in a car accident.

If Sheila had lived through the pain caused by the loss of her father several years earlier, how would she have evaluated her feelings about the break-up and the missed career opportunity? Would she have been just as down? Would she have thought she could never feel worse?
Sheila came to life just five minutes ago in my mind. Her story, however, is a bit older. It has been lived by real people before in many different versions. And it makes me wonder: how relative is pain? And what scales do we use to quantify our ups and downs?

The range of human feelings is limited. You might say you can go from very low and devastated to very high and euphoric. But, after all, you’re still limited to the amount of hormones your body can produce. Thinking about the interval of human emotion, how wide is the range? Do we all ‘feel’ within comparable emotional borders or does our personal span change as we experience extreme feelings? Maybe the range increases when we go through moments of intense loss or floods of happiness. On the other hand it might contract when we blunt ourselves to global suffering, or just ‘forget’ how to be happy.
Yes, it’s possible that someone who has been blessed with a happy life can feel almost the same emotions when something ‘relatively bad’ happens as a less lucky person feels when tragedy strikes again. And I think that’s ok. If we feel down just because somebody is dying somewhere this very minute, than we’re not bringing more joy into this world.

Don’t get tricked into scaling your emotions to the global standards. You might find your personal average suddenly drop. Either because you feel guilty of your happiness compared to others’ suffering, or because you feel jealous of others’ happiness compared to your suffering. Stick to your own scale and try to keep your personal standards high. Then one day we really will find the global average has gone up!