When I was studying in high school, while reading a text about marriage and family for a reading comprehension exercise, my Chinese teacher introduced a term: “gǎnqíng shāngpǐnhuà” (感情商品化) - the commodification of emotions. At that time, my only goal was to score high on exams, so I wrote this phrase in my notebook and continued answering the reading comprehension questions. Since then, this phrase has taken on much deeper meaning for me.

But in reality, this concept helps us describe very important moral norms in society. When we discuss comparing the value of ordinary commodities like eggs, stocks, computers, or clothes, we don’t have this uncomfortable feeling. But as soon as we say that relationships between people also have value, it becomes a particularly uncomfortable sensation. To say that the time I spend with friends, the emotions we share together, the history we experience together, can be converted into a price, a certain amount of money - this is not only uncomfortable but also a particularly difficult economic problem. To solve this we would need to do three things.

• First, understand our own emotional needs
• Second, analyze all our social relationships and figure out which emotional needs they satisfy
• Third, understand which of our emotional needs are insufficient and which are excessive (if it’s a good emotion, can there be too much of something? Or is “too much” a relative concept - does too much of one emotion mean other good emotions are insufficient?)

Complete this thinking and integrate it into your life. Use every social interaction, every word, every action, every expression, every piece of clothing to optimize your own emotional balance.

This kind of thinking is crazy and impractical. If you really tried so hard to describe your reactions this way every time you communicate with others, thinking so mechanically, others would surely leave. Then you wouldn’t achieve your goal either, but would end up alone instead. Slavoj Žižek once said: “You can say why you are in love, the reasons appear as causes of love only when you are (you believe) in love.” In other words we only can construct the reason or the mechanisms that cause an emotion post hoc. The manifest expression of an emotion is an ephemeral state, an attitude. This maxim applies to all emotions - our bodies are the creators of emotion, not our minds (logic), so we cannot use this kind of economic thinking method to understand it (our emotions). When people deliberately imitate an emotion, for example, spending time with someone you don’t like because you want their money or social status, that’s when we can truly put a value on the emotion you give them. But in fact, evaluating emotional value is for understanding social ethics, not as advice for making you happier (feeling more good emotions).

I will continue describing this problem, but honestly I haven’t written articles in Chinese for a long time, so I wanted to practice a bit. To be continued next time.