On volatility and emotion.

I am currently unhappy.
Now, you might suggest that I do something about that. Of course, how do you fix something if you're not sure what it is? Perhaps I should figure it out, you might say. Let me show you where the problem lies.

Do I have some sort of physical need? Eat? Sleep?
No. Not really. Well... I'm sleep deprived and haven't been eating all that well...
Or maybe it's work. I do hate my job a little right now. I certainly don't look forward to it.
Maybe it's stress from classes... I have six or seven hours of work I'm about to start... but I'll do it, eventually, so why do I still feel stressed?
Maybe it's my social relationships... but wait... I have some good friends and no real issues. I'm lonely, but that's partly my own fault. I'm simultaneously lonely and too tired to deal with social situations. Which loneliness makes me more tired, and thus more lonely. Maybe that's it... but then, there is that unrequited love thing...
Of course, graduation is fast approaching and I don't know how I'm going to figure out what the hell I'm doing next year, or where I'm going to grad school the next year.
Those are big things! Perhaps I should spend more time figuring those out. But no! It just gets scarier the more I look when I'm already upset.
And by this time in my mental processes, I am wracked with feelings of grief, inexplicable disappointment and self-doubt.
How could I ever have thought I would make a good researcher? Why hasn't anyone called me? Why do I feel so horrible after my favorite psych class when I should be happy?
Why? Why!?
And it only gets worse. The range of my emotions seems deeper. I feel pulled down, drowning under the iced-over lake. I want to give up. I want to lay my head down and cry till I don't exist anymore.

And then I remember.
There is really no reason, out of all my problems, why I'm feeling this way.
It is a simple chemical reaction, causing a negative cascade inside my mind. A medication that was supposed to alleviate one pain has brought another. Reckless emotion.

This is a problem. Because here I am, feeling like my despair is as real and tangible as it gets. How could I feel this way if there wasn't something desperately wrong?

I value my emotions. I allow them quite a bit of free reign, perhaps because they are the only thing that gives me a sense of meaning. Why do I do anything? Because it brings me joy or pleasure. If there was no feeling, I would cease to have reason to do anything.
And yet this emotion is what is interfering with my life.
The more I study psychology, the more I find that many of the emotions we experience are artificial. They are induced by things we are unaware of, modulated by the things we're doing, by the passing expression of strangers.
And for what?
For me, I feel crushed. I know that earlier I was walking down the street, watching people interact, thinking about how great it was to study the very pulse of existance, the art of the science. I smiled with great joy.
But I know that now I see nothing but wearisome work around me. No rewards in sight. Hope is a distant construct that is fanciful nonsense in the practical world. Every bit of joy I will ever experience will be paired with a subsequent betrayal or loss or humiliation.
There is no happily ever after, no lasting peace. Eventually, we are nothing but stellar dust.

Now imagine trying to do homework.

It is unfortunate to be this way, because it makes you rather high maintenance. It becomes difficult for people to be around you because you require so very much energy to sustain. This of course only compounds feelings of despair and lonliness.

The proble is that it is all artificial. These feelings of profundity and intensity are artifacts of biological processes. They have no real meaning.
And the only thing to do is to plod through. If you can afford the time, perhaps you can do something pleasurable to lessen their hold, although that runs the risk of putting you in a situation where you experience the end of your pleasure and makes you even more disappointed.
It's frustrating, but simply requires strength of will, and a belief that this state is artificially caused, and perhaps you can come up a little.
But it is an unhappy cycle, and a lonely one.