Why the World Now Has a Mood

Who leaked my feelings to the Weather App?
Who dares to prognosticate my emotional state three hours from now?
Maybe the company’s called Prognos & Sons?

This little prophecy struck me as boldly presumptuous — like those city maps that announce:
“You are here.”
Really? How do they know?

Don’t worry — I’m not serious.
But ever since that moment, the idea of feeling has stayed with me.
Not just figuratively. Literally.

The Age of Feeling

Since the pandemic, something has shifted.
Feelings have started running the show.

Emotions — joy, fear, sadness, anger — now frame our response to almost everything, especially the news.
Every headline is designed to be felt first and understood later.
Evolution loves that: emotions are its shortcut for survival, empathy, and reaction.
Feeling is the oldest human app — and still the most intuitive interface we’ve got.

But emotions don’t explain the world.
That’s still the job of facts.
And while the media tries (sometimes nobly, sometimes not), it often struggles to balance drama and truth.
Every newsroom has its own emotional climate, depending on who signs the paycheques.

When Feeling Meets Knowing

So what’s the real difference between what we feel and what we know?

Feeling is subjective — wildly personal — but it sees more nuance than logic ever will.
It reads the room before the room even knows it’s speaking.

Knowledge, on the other hand, relies on what can be verified and reproduced.
It keeps the heartbeat steady when panic wants the mic.

Feeling without fact drifts.
Fact without feeling freezes.
Together, they make sense of things — most of the time.

Examples, Anyone?

Take relationships.
When people fight, logic rarely solves it.
You don’t heal trust with a spreadsheet.
You heal it with understanding, empathy, forgiveness — emotional labour, not legal evidence.

Or take art.
Art doesn’t care about technique sheets or pigment formulas.
We don’t analyze a painting; we feel it.
Sometimes it’s nonsense that makes sense.

Politics, however, needs more fact than feeling.
Emotion may win elections, but it can’t run a country.
Facts, boring as they seem, are the ballast that keeps the ship from tipping over.

Facts are emotion-poor.
Feelings are fact-poor.
And somewhere between the two, we live.