As long-time (or casual) readers of SJ may already be aware, I’m not a big fan of feelings. It’s not that they don’t have their place, but they tend to be used inappropriately, as in lieu of thinking. History prof at UNC, Molly Worthen, sees the problem as well.

IN American politics, few forces are more powerful than a voter’s vague intuition. “I support Donald Trump because I feel like he is a doer,” a senior at the University of South Carolina told Cosmopolitan. “Personally, I feel like Bernie Sanders is too idealistic,” a Yale studentexplained to a reporter in Florida. At a Ted Cruz rally in Wisconsin in April, a Cruz fan declared, “I feel like I can trust that he will keep his promises.”

These people don’t think, believe or reckon. They “feel like.” Listen for this phrase and you’ll hear it everywhere, inside and outside politics. This reflex to hedge every statement as a feeling or a hunch is most common among millennials. But I hear it almost as often among Generation Xers and my own colleagues in academia. As in so many things, the young are early carriers of a broad cultural contagion.

A contagion, indeed, although it might have been worthwhile to leave “believe” out of the mix, since that’s the nature of religion. Priests believe. 

This linguistic hedging is particularly common at universities, where calls for trigger warnings and safe spaces may have eroded students’ inclination to assert or argue. It is safer to merely “feel.” Bradley Campbell, a sociologist at California State University, Los Angeles, was an author of an article about the shift on many campuses from a “culture of dignity,” which celebrates free speech, to a “culture of victimhood” marked by the assumption that “people are so fragile that they can’t hear something offensive,” he told me.

Yet here is the paradox: “I feel like” masquerades as a humble conversational offering, an invitation to share your feelings, too — but the phrase is an absolutist trump card. It halts argument in its tracks.

Bet you didn’t see that coming.  After all, what could be more benign, more modest, than asserting something based upon feelings?  It doesn’t make the other guy wrong, but merely expresses what the initiator of communication feels. What could possibly be wrong with that?

When people cite feelings or personal experience, “you can’t really refute them with logic, because that would imply they didn’t have that experience, or their experience is less valid,” Ms. Chai told me.

“It’s a way of deflecting, avoiding full engagement with another person or group,” Elisabeth Lasch-Quinn, a historian at Syracuse University, said, “because it puts a shield up immediately. You cannot disagree.”

And why does this matter?

Languages constantly evolve, and curmudgeons like me are always taking umbrage at some new idiom. But make no mistake: “I feel like” is not a harmless tic. George Orwell put the point simply: “If thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.” The phrase says a great deal about our muddled ideas about reason, emotion and argument — a muddle that has political consequences.

It’s always nice to read the thoughts of a fellow curmudgeon like Worthen, but her deconstruction of the phrase “I feel like” is incomplete.  While she’s certainly correct that it’s not a harmless rhetorical tic, and it stifles disagreement because there is no rational challenge to what another person feels, turning it into an argumentative “cudgel,” there remains an unexplored problem.

No one cares. At least, if you aren’t someone whose feelings matter to the person with whom you’re communicating, then the recipient of your expose of your feelings shrugs and says, “so what?”

If the purpose of communication is persuasion, to convey a point, to illuminate, to clarify, then the one thing that will fail miserably is to share one’s feelings.  Like the vulgar analogy of opinions being like assholes, we all have our feelings. Are yours more important than mine? Are yours more important than anyone else’s? You feel that X is wonderful? I feel that Y is wonderful. Neither of us is more right or wrong because of how we feel, and neither of us has accomplished anything by informing someone else of our feelings.

This is the indulgence in narcissism.  By putting our feelings on display, two things happen: first, we inform the world how we feel, as if the world gives a damn. Second, we’ve tacitly begged for validation of our feelings.  Give me some Facebook likes, bro. Tell me that my feelz are your feelz, that my feelings matter because they’re your feelings too.

There is a never-ending stream of comments here by people who feel compelled to play this game, to inform us (meaning, me, as writer, you, as reader) of the commenter’s “lived experience” as if this were a democracy, and the more “likes” one gathers, the more truthy one’s feelings.  It’s not that there are facts or logic offered to explain how someone arrived at their feelings.

Granted, as Worthen explains, there is an emotional component to normative reasoning, our sense of what constitutes a reasonable argument based upon our sensibilities and experiences.

Antonio Damasio put forward a hypothesis that is now widely accepted: In a healthy brain, emotional input is a crucial part of reasoning and decision making.

So when I called Dr. Damasio, who teaches at the University of Southern California, I worried that he might strike down my humanistic observations with unflinching scientific objectivity. He didn’t — he hates the phrase as much as I do. He called it “bad usage” and “a sign of laziness in thinking,” not because it acknowledges the presence of emotion, but because it is an imprecise hedge that conceals more than it reveals. “It doesn’t follow that because you have doubts, or because something is tempered by a gut feeling, that you cannot make those distinctions as clear as possible,” he said.

It’s easy to see the world through the self-serving lens of one’s feelings, that if your opinion is ruled by your gut or tears, that’s good enough. And indeed, it’s a perfectly fine way for you to reach any conclusion you please. But nobody else gives a damn. Have all the feelz you want, but they’re yours. The world isn’t fascinated by your feelings, and your inability to grasp that yours are no more valuable than anyone else’s.