Am I recognizing my feelings correctly?

Only you can determine if your emotional reactions are off from baseline. You might take this depression self test to see if you are depressed.

Mayo Clinic

This is a good time to get some feedback from someone close to you or from an expert. Do you have someone you can bounce these ideas off of? A therapist would really help with this.

Know what this sounds similar to? Sounds like my current battle with pop music. I’ll try to explain.. I grew up with a DJ for a brother. I’ve been practicing DJing a bit myself but I’m not at all a crowd pleaser. I play fairly abstract tunes that don’t quite fit into the mainstream. Meanwhile, of course, I believe they ought to be mainstream.

I’m not a very young person anymore though and I’ve battled with the concept of mainstream/pop vs “good” music for many years in my adult life. When I hear pop music, I totally get why so many people feel it and like it and get hooked by it. I get why they would react to it to the point of expression, like dancing, heigtend social mood, etc.. but for me, hearing this music turns me off. I find myself contemplating the value of giving that kind of music any expression time at all. I feel disingenuous when I catch myself singing the lyrics or whatever to some shitty britney spears or spice girls song. It all sounds the same, I’ve heard those melodies and chords before.. I’m sick of it. I change the station in the car, I listen to new music all the time, I do whatever I can to avoid hearing that mainstreamy-pop sound!

Yesterday while driving to visit my parents, I was listening to a new “all the best music” station. Which of course just meant the same poppy crap as ever. In fact, this new station was replacing a college radio station that used to play all indie bands and djs and hiphop all the time. It was offensive. Anyway, I sat there listening to this “new” music station with some “new” pop song playing which of course sounded like every other.. and I started thinking: You know how people think we can use will power to do anything? I wonder if someone as musically snobby as me could will myself into liking pop music. I wondered if it would be possible if I set my mind to it. Do I have that kind of control over myself? Could I start going to poppy clubs and dancing up a storm to the worst music in the world by choice?

Actually, this wasn’t the first time I had these thoughts. My distemper about pop music is something that nags at me often. I’m constantly challenged by the thought of it and as of yet, I don’t feel I’ve ever really put my mind to not taking it so seriously. In fact, the real question I have is: How do I stop noticing when pop music is playing? I feel like it’s a useless obsession.

Anyway.. I’ll have to finish my thoughts at a later time.

Perhaps you’re just maturing and seeing things in a more realistic way. Most people’s reactions calm down as we get older.

Sounds more like disassociation than depression to me, but what do I know. In either case, I encourage you to call a familiar mental health professional and share this changed sense of reality with them. Life is not an awake dream. It shouldn’t feel like one.

Have you been seeing a psychiatrist? Because it seems to me that if you have feelings like this, it may be a good time to check in with him or her.

Sounds like teenage angst. How old are you? Would you fit into that age bracket?

I spent my whole life second-guessing myself.

For me there are three levels to the relationship between emotions and self:
Mastery
Harmony
Slavery

Idealistically, Harmony is desirable,
but,
practically, Mastery is better than Slavery.

Within our competitive and judgemental society, there is much motivation to control (read: suppress) emotions. It’s a pity that people find it hard to really get to know me, but I prefer to sacrifice some intimacy and agreeableness, for the sake of protecting myself from manipulation and entanglement within an unpredictable system.

I find society so disgusting, as a whole, that I often have almost no reaction to events that others find extremely moving. I find I can appreciate the smaller, unnoticed details more… well, honestly. There’s definitely a groupthink thing going on with ‘how you are supposed to feel’ about things, which automatically repels me from participation.

Of course, I do want to experience strong emotions (make the most of being human), and I find the purest way to do so is by appreciation of the beauty of the natural world. There are no social suggestions or implications WRT experiencing Nature, so I am comfortable with whatever I feel there.

I have developed some more intimate personal relationships recently, and though that necessarily involves pain and frustration at points, it has been overall relatively fulfilling. I’m still not completely at ease emotionally there (second-guessing everybody’s motives and emotions kinda detracts from my own experience of ‘the moment’), but I am comfortable with that fact.

Anyway, I know having to feign delight, or deal with angry/distraught people, can drain the colour from your own emotions, but just because you often doubt the necessity or purity of others’ – or your own – feelings&expressions, doesn’t mean you should discount all feelings as vacuous.

Look around for things to really amaze you, and be ambitious about it!