Episode 447

There Are No Onions

On social media, you can find many videos that bring your emotions to the surface – footage of dogs caring for cats, a clip of a father seeing his daughter for the first time in years, cute ducks rescuing their ducklings and many other things.

In the comments, it’s normal to read people saying things like “I’m not crying – you’re crying!” or “Wow, is someone cutting onions?”

Perhaps these comments are just jokes, but perhaps they’re reflective of the cultures we live in. Rather than simply say they are moved, many people find a roundabout way of saying that they are affected emotionally.

Maybe we don’t need to be cool, to be detached from our emotions, or make excuses for them. Maybe those emotions are worth being honest about.

Hosts & Guests

Kurt Robinson

Transcript

Welcome, beautiful thinkers!

This is A Beautiful Thought. This is how your life is already wonderful.

I was thinking about this phrase, I wrote this the other day? The phrase is, “there are no onions.”

What do I mean by that?

You know, a lot of the time I seen these videos on YouTube, or this videos on Tiktok, or wherever and there’s Instagram.

And it might be a very moving video, something so sweet, like, for example, a daughter reunited with a father or somebody showing a random act of kindness.

Or on Tik Tok, sometimes this fellow who does this stuff he gives gives away money, kind of random, but this is a sort of sense to it.

So sometimes people will put in the comments like, “Give $500 to the first person who finishes your song”, and he goes around, he is like “You are my sunshine”.

And somebody starts singing with my only sunshine and they finish that song.

And he says, “Wow, thanks for singing with me. Here’s $500.”

And the person is like, “What? Wow, what? Wow.”

And you know, at first, they don’t want to take it and maybe they reluctantly accept it.

And they say, “You know, this is so valuable to me, because actually, I was having trouble meeting my bills, and this is going to make a huge difference.”

And people so moved in the comments, and they write things like “Is somebody cutting onions?”

Or they say this other thing. I don’t know exactly where this comes from. But it’s a meme. Maybe it’s from a TV show or something but people write, “I’m not crying, you’re crying.”

And on one hand of these things, kind of innocent jokes, and maybe they don’t mean anything. Maybe they do mean something, maybe they actually mean how disconnected people are from their own emotions, that people don’t necessarily know what they feel.

And that’s why they say these things, they can’t simply state the truth, which is I am moved by this video or this dispute.

This video is so beautiful, you know, it touched me that that makes my heart warm or something like that.

They have to resort to this circuitous way of explaining their emotions.

And maybe they don’t even know what their own emotions are, when they’re having this physiological response to their emotions, their eyes are watering.

But they don’t know exactly why.

That’s why you would write something like this. Perhaps it’s, I wonder if it’s actually some kind of symptom of English speaking culture.

A lot of people in English speaking culture have difficulty saying directly what they mean of course, this is most obvious in Britain, in certain parts of Britain, where people will really not say what they mean like if they don’t like something, they will find any way to skirt around it.

Even if they if they really enjoy something, they’ll be like, “Well, that was quite pleasant” or sometimes something like this.

Or in the US. Ever since the days of Seinfeld, people infected with this the sarcasm so like we can’t say what we truly mean.

We don’t have to look for the onions.

There are no onions.

We feel those emotions.

We can go ahead and feel them and it doesn’t matter if we are uncool.

Maybe let’s let’s be uncool.

Maybe let’s show our emotions and be with our emotions and express honestly, our emotions.

Maybe people won’t know exactly how to take that.

Maybe we should do it anyway.

Because people benefit from being in touch with that part of the soul.

And even if they are a little uncomfortable, maybe they will start to realize, “Hang on, a person can be real like that.”

“A can throw out those onions that were the excuse for their eyes tearing up and be vulnerable in any situation.”

And that’s powerful.

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